alternative churches – Religion & Ethics NewsWeeklyhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics
An examination of religion's role and the ethical dimensions behind top news headlines.Wed, 05 Apr 2017 14:50:31 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.7.5 Churches in Pubshttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2015/02/20/february-20-2015-churches-pubs/25265/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2015/02/20/february-20-2015-churches-pubs/25265/#disqus_threadFri, 20 Feb 2015 17:00:10 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=25265Rev. Phillip Heinze says when he realized that for some people the most difficult thing is walking through the doors of a church, he decided to “try a new church in a place that’s not so scary." More →

]]>Pastor Phillip Heinze began holding church services in a bar when he realized that attending a regular church was uncomfortable for some people. “They say the most difficult thing for us was walking through those doors—that for us church just is a scary place. That was probably the conversation that informed me the most. I said, well, let’s try a new church in place that’s not so scary.” There are a growing number of religious services and conversations in pubs, but the trend has its critics.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2015/02/20/february-20-2015-churches-pubs/25265/feed/0 Second Lifehttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2009/09/18/september-18-2009-second-life/4243/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2009/09/18/september-18-2009-second-life/4243/#disqus_threadFri, 18 Sep 2009 20:23:04 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=4243"Spirituality has always had a virtual aspect to it," says anthropology professor Tom Boellsdorff. "People in Second Life can pray and do all kinds of things and find it completely spiritually fulfilling." More →

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: When the sun comes up in Second Life, which it does every four hours, you are immediately overwhelmed by the vast, brightly colored mish-mash of stores, houses, and malls stretching across multiple continents—all of it, including the mountains and forests, designed and built from scratch by the tens of thousands of people who regularly visit here.

Move your mouse and you tour the Taj Mahal. A few clicks and you are launched on a NASA rocket into low orbit. Click again and you can join a service in an Anglican cathedral. This live, online world called Second Life was launched in 2003 by the San Francisco company Linden Lab and its founder Phillip Rosedale, who says he had no idea what would happen.

PHILIP ROSEDALE (Chairman of the Board, Linden Lab): Well, I always figured in the beginning that if Second Life looked like anything we were able to predict that we would have failed, that if it was predictable we weren’t doing the right stuff.

SEVERSON: Second Life is definitely not predictable. Turn a corner and you might run into a furry animal that talks. It isn’t just the buildings that are designed by residents. They also design themselves, creating virtual bodies called avatars either sculpted in their own likeness or, more often, someone they would like to be. And then they chat with other avatars, even becoming close friends. For some, the virtual world is a way to escape. Others say it enriches their real-world lives.

(to Michael Adcock): You still seem to get this social value out of it.

MICHAEL ADCOCK (Freelance Designer): Yeah, I do.

SEVERSON: Michael Adcock has been into Second Life for about three years. He says, for him, hiding his real identity behind an avatar which, in his case, looks like a warrior painted in silver, has helped him learn more about himself.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I’ve found that I’ve been able to be a lot more up-front and blunt in what is on my mind right away. That happens to say quite a bit about myself, and I choose to look at that as a learning experience.

SEVERSON: Most people in Second Life don’t use real names. The woman you see here might actually be a man, or vice versa.

This avatar actually is a man. He’s Tom Boellstorff, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Irvine and editor-in-chief of the American Anthropologist. He has written extensively on the culture of virtual worlds.

PROFESSOR TOM BOELLSTORFF (University of California, Irvine): For some people, the escape factor is one of the best things about a virtual world like Second Life. You can try having a totally different life, and there’s people who get married inside of Second Life to someone that they don’t even know who that person is in the physical world, even if it’s really a man or a woman in the physical world. They have a house and even virtual kids and a job, and they have a whole life inside of Second Life.

SEVERSON: It costs nothing to get into Second Life, but if you choose to be part of it, to build a home, for instance, then you will have to spend real money. It’s like visiting a foreign land. You convert dollars into Second Life currency called Linden dollars.

Professor Tom Boellstorff

PROFESSOR BOELLSTORFF: So here is what my house looks like. This is land that I own. I spent—this cost about $50 US to buy this land and about $15 a month to keep, to be able to continue to own it. That’s how the company makes their money.

SEVERSON: You constructed a cathedral like this once?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Yeah, I did.

SEVERSON: How long did it take you?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Eighteen months.

SEVERSON: Eighteen months of your life.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: Yeah, off and on, you know.

SEVERSON: Where is it?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: It’s deleted now.

SEVERSON: Wait a minute. Eighteen months, and it’s deleted?

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I couldn’t afford to maintain the simulation, to keep it running, yeah.

SEVERSON: It would have cost him $350 a month to keep it. But there are other cathedrals he can visit which took other residents months or even years to build.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: There is a cathedral right here.

SEVERSON: You don’t look like a typical Sunday churchgoer.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: That’s true, I don’t. But they’re nice, and they welcomed me and asked me how I’m doing.

SEVERSON: It took a decade for churches to have a strong presence on the Internet, but Professor Boellstorff says it is beginning to attract followers in Second Life.

PROFESSOR BOELLSTORFF: There are already people I know who say that they go to, you know, every Sunday they don’t go to church any more in the physical world. They go every Sunday to church in Second Life, and that is their faith community that they are interacting with.

SEVERSON: We spoke with the leadership team of the Anglican Cathedral of Second Life. Mark Brown is the priest-in-charge. In real life he runs a Bible society in Wellington, New Zealand. Cady Enoch chairs the committee. She’s in Columbus, Ohio, and Helene Milena is the worship service leader. She’s in West Yorkshire, England.

HELENE MILENA (Teacher and Counselor): I think there is an intimacy here, in any online set-up, actually, but at the same time there is an anonymity, and the two mean that people can be very, very open. It would be very unusual in real life to meet someone and ten minutes later be knowing about their difficulties with their marriage, or something of that nature.

SEVERSON: In order to accommodate attendees from around the world, the virtual church is now offering 7 services a week.

MARK BROWN (CEO, New Zealand Bible Society): Straightaway it is the opportunity to mingle with people around the world. We have about 20 nations represented in our community. I absolutely love that. I love the richness of that, that regardless of where we are in the world, we can come together and worship.

SEVERSON: Second Lifers tend to become hooked on the experience. Michael Adcock says he was spending 12 or more hours a day for awhile. This can have negative consequences on real-world relationships. There have been at least two highly publicized divorces resulting from what were supposedly virtual affairs in Second Life. Questions are often raised about ethical behavior by people who can hide behind anonymous identities on the Internet.

SIBLEY VERBECK (Founder and CEO, The Electric Sheep Company): If you look out on the Web, as long as there’s been forums where people post comments or chat rooms, people are often quite rude to each other, and a lot of that is that degree of anonymity that’s there.

SEVERSON: Sibley Verbeck founded the Electric Sheep Company, which has created its own virtual worlds. He thinks people tend to be more civil in Second Life

SIBLEY VERBECK: But it is more human, because you see this human figure, and you’re interacting with them in real time.

MICHAEL ADCOCK: I don’t see much of a difference between what I’m doing here, or what I’m thinking, or what I’m doing in my real life. It’s all the same thing.

SEVERSON: There’s not much you can’t find or do in Second Life. There are virtual shops that sell everything from virtual artwork to virtual waterfalls. Second Life is a community of creators, and it’s economy is based to a large extent on marketing art and architecture.

PHILIP ROSEDALE: So far as we can tell, there’s like 60,000 people that are cash-flow positive from their operations, but there’s thousands of people that would call this employment of some kind.

SEVERSON: Elisha Allen is director of new media and extended learning at the University of New Mexico. Like many learning institutions, the university is experimenting with Second Life as way to reach students who can’t make it to the campus.

ELISHA ALLEN (Associate Director, New Media and Extended Learning, University of New Mexico): I’ve been to a number of conferences in Second Life where I had the opportunity to meet peers at other universities without actually having to fly there, and it’s interesting because the memories of those conferences are very real, and it did feel like I was there, wherever “there” was.

SEVERSON: But Elisha agrees with those who say that navigating around Second Life can be daunting.

ELISHA ALLEN: Second Life, while it’s maybe the state-of-the-art for virtual worlds right now, I think has a long way to go before it’s something that I would consider to be really, fully immersive.

SEVERSON: For others, like Reverend Mark, it’s a godsend.

MARK BROWN: There’s no artificiality of me, here I am sitting in my study in New Zealand looking at a monitor. I am real flesh-and-blood. The way I am communicating and relating, of course, is different, but the same experience is welling up, and that is really how this is able to be intense and intimate and actually quite a real experience.

SEVERSON: About a million-and-a-half people have visited Second Life in the last couple of months. They are typically in their mid-thirties. But there are millions of kids under 12 who are growing up with virtual reality games and programs designed especially for them. Verbeck and others predict that a decade from now, when these kids are in their 20s, places like Second Life are going to grow dramatically in popularity.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2009/09/18/september-18-2009-second-life/4243/feed/11 The Emerging Church, Part Twohttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2005/07/15/july-15-2005-the-emerging-church-part-two/11767/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2005/07/15/july-15-2005-the-emerging-church-part-two/11767/#disqus_threadFri, 15 Jul 2005 19:17:24 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=11767The emerging church movement seeks to apply the Christian message in a contemporary, postmodern culture and is developing new ideas about worship, theology, and mission. Brian McLaren’s provocative writings have become a manifesto of sorts for many in the emergent conversation. But he’s also generating intense controversy, especially among conservative evangelicals. More →

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Last week here we reported on the new emerging church movement, the effort among both evangelical and mainline Protestants, especially those in their 20s and 30s, to create new ways to do and look at worship. One of the most influential leaders in the emergent church is Brian McLaren, a pastor from Maryland. Today, Kim Lawton talks with McLaren and explores the controversy surrounding some of his views.

KIM LAWTON: Brian McLaren doesn’t look like a revolutionary. He calls himself a “middle-aged, bald introvert with a small Buddha belly.” And at first glance, he seems like a pretty typical evangelical pastor whose nondenominational community church reaches out to unbelievers. But in fact, McLaren is at the forefront of a controversial new effort to rethink Christianity for a new generation.

Pastor MCLAREN: What I think many of us are concerned about is, how can we go back and get reconnected to Jesus with all of his radical, profound, far-reaching message of the kingdom of God?

LAWTON: The emerging church movement seeks to apply that message in a contemporary, postmodern culture and is developing new ideas about worship, theology, and mission. McLaren’s provocative writings have become a manifesto of sorts for many in the emergent conversation. But he’s also generating intense controversy, especially among conservative evangelicals.

DON CARSON (Professor, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School): Do I think he’s saying some dangerous things — dangerous in the sense that he’s diverting people from things that are central to the gospel, that are non-negotiable as part of the gospel, he’s diverting people away from those things? Yes, in that sense, I think he’s dangerous.

LAWTON: McLaren grew up in a conservative evangelical background, but has no formal theological training. He’s a former college English professor who became pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church, in Burtonsville, Maryland, which he helped found in 1982. He began writing about a growing frustration over the way Christianity was being practiced in many evangelical churches.

Pastor MCLAREN: In my travels, where I speak and where people talk to me about my books, they say to me again and again: “The people who are the normal spokespeople for the Christian faith don’t speak for me. They don’t represent me. That approach to faith is not my approach.”

LAWTON: McLaren outlined a new vision in his 2004 book, A GENEROUS ORTHODOXY, where he urges Christians to move beyond traditional categories.

Pastor MCLAREN: I fear that what happens in our polarization is we stop saying, “Am I becoming a person who’s more Christlike? Am I becoming a person who’s more part of God’s mission?” And we think, “Am I being a good conservative, or am I being a good liberal, or am I being a good Protestant or a good Catholic?” And, you know, that can end up really being a colossal adventure in missing the point.

LAWTON: Many churches in the emergent movement have adopted McLaren’s call for a faith that integrates elements of different Christian traditions. McLaren describes himself as evangelical, charismatic, fundamentalist, Anabaptist, Anglican, and Catholic — among other things.

Don Carson is a prominent professor of New Testament at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois. He criticizes McLaren’s blended approach.

Prof. CARSON: At the end of the day, it becomes a kind of very isolated, new form of individualism, in which I pick up what I want from these things, rather than in fact belonging, honestly, to any of them. Instead of being all of these things, he really isn’t any of them.

LAWTON: But McLaren insists a more open view enriches faith and better equips Christians for ministry. He’s become a strong voice urging more attention to issues from poverty to the environment to social justice. He’s been active in the effort to raise more attention to the atrocities in Sudan’s Darfur province.

Pastor MCLAREN: The way we treat our neighbors; the way we treat people of other races, religions, social classes, educational backgrounds, political parties; the way we treat other people and interact with the environment, and all the rest is part of our spirituality.

Pastor MCLAREN: Well, first of all, I’m not at all against the idea of a personal relationship with God. I think that’s where it all begins. And I think this is part of the beauty of the message of Jesus. Every individual is invited into a personal relationship with God. But personal is not private. The church has been preoccupied with the question, “What happens to your soul after you die?” As if the reason for Jesus coming can be summed up in, “Jesus is trying to help get more souls into heaven, as opposed to hell, after they die.” I just think a fair reading of the Gospels blows that out of the water. I don’t think that the entire message and life of Jesus can be boiled down to that bottom line.

LAWTON: Scot McKnight teaches religious studies at Chicago’s North Park University. He says McLaren’s work threatens many within conservative Christianity.

SCOT MCKNIGHT (Professor, North Park University): He’s asking hard questions, and he’s not letting people get by with shallow answers. So, he’s forcing conversation about topics that are kind of sacred cows in the evangelical church.

LAWTON: McLaren’s latest book, THE LAST WORD AND THE WORD AFTER THAT, urges Christians to reassess conventional views of hell.

Pastor MCLAREN: One of the deepest problems is that — and nobody ever would intend this — but that for some people, the traditional view of hell makes God look like a torturer. My purpose is to get conversation going about the old view and problems with it so that we can together move forward in reconsidering, and maybe there is a better understanding of what Jesus meant and what the scriptures mean when they’ve talked about issues like judgment, justice, hell.

LAWTON: McLaren never says exactly what that better understanding might be, just as he declines to take specific stands on other controversial issues for the church, such as homosexuality.

Pastor MCLAREN: Well, you know, a couple people tell me they think I’m being evasive. They think I’m a coward, I’m afraid to say what I really think. But here’s the interesting thing. I don’t think I’d be saying what I’m saying if I was a coward. I’m saying that because I’m trying to be faithful to God, I’m trying to be faithful to the teaching and example of Jesus. So it’s my fidelity to my understanding of the Christian message that makes me say sometimes, “We’re asking the wrong question.”

LAWTON: McLaren believes Christians must always question their own interpretations of Scripture. The Bible, he says, is not a “look-it-up encyclopedia of moral truths.”

Pastor MCLAREN: The Bible’s so much more complex than that. If people want to start picking out a verse from the Bible here and picking out a verse there, and picking out a verse, we’re going to have stonings going on in the street. It’s a crazy way to interpret the Bible, in my opinion. Now that doesn’t mean that we just throw out the Bible, but we’ve got to learn ways to engage with the wisdom in the Bible that help us be more ethical and more humane and not less.

LAWTON: It’s here that critics like Professor Carson have the most problems with McLaren.

Prof. CARSON: The historic good news of the gospel, right across the centuries, has always been concerned not only with excellent relationships and who God is and turning from that which is evil. But it has also been concerned to confess certain things as true.

Pastor MCLAREN: I look back in history and I think, you know, for a long time people who believed in Jesus, believed in the Bible, either tolerated or actively defended slavery. I think ethically, out of faithfulness to God, we’ve got to realize that people in the name of the Christian faith have done some horrible things. And so we always have to be open to places where we’re wrong.

LAWTON (To Pastor McLaren): Are there truths related to the faith out there that we can know, that we can be certain about?

Pastor MCLAREN: First of all, when we talk about faith, the word “faith” and the word “certainty,” we’ve got a whole lot of problems there. What do we mean by “certainty”? If I could substitute the word “confidence,” I’d say, yes, I think there are things we can be confident about, and those are the things we have to really work with.

Prof. CARSON: Human beings can know things, not with the certainty that belongs only to God, but with all kinds of degrees of certainty on which you base your life. The kinds of knowledge that are appropriate to human beings.

LAWTON: McLaren is careful to emphasize that he doesn’t speak for everyone in the emerging church movement. But he’s clearly struck a chord with many. Now he’s stepping back from many of his responsibilities at Cedar Ridge Church so he can devote more time to expanding the emergent dialogue in other parts of the world.

Pastor MCLAREN: If we see this thing turn into something that has real implications for health and well-being in our world, that to me has a lot of the feel of God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven, which is something all of us Christians pray for.

LAWTON: Only then, he says, will the emergent conversation truly be a movement. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

It is a group of people who are trying to put together two things that have been apart. One of them is a fidelity to the Christian message, and a real concern about it actually being lived out in practice. And we’re saying you can’t have one without the other.

How does that work itself out in the way congregations and communities look and act?

When you try to put those things together, you end up with a stronger emphasis on practices. It’s not just doctrines that people get in their minds, although our thinking is very, very important. But also there is a desire to have practices that actually form us as people. What’s interesting to me about this is [that] this trend of emphasizing practices and a lived faith is happening across the spectrum. Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, evangelicals, charismatics — many people being drawn together by this common emphasis. Then when you are emphasizing personal transformation and the experience of God and learning to actually live in a relationship with God from day to day, I think when it really gets exciting is when that works out in the social sphere. When we start saying this means the way we treat our neighbors; the way we treat people of other races, religions, social classes, educational backgrounds, political parties; the way we treat other people and interact with the environment, and all the rest is part of our spirituality. When that happens, when those things get integrated, I think that’s the makings of a very exciting spiritual life and movement.

How did all of this get started?

Well, back in the early 1990s there was an organization called Leadership Network funded by an individual in Texas, and Leadership Network was bringing together the leaders of megachurches around the country. By the early and mid-’90s, they noticed, though, that the kinds of people that were coming to their events were getting a year older every year, and there wasn’t a [group of] younger people filling in. They were one of the first major organizations to notice this.

They started realizing that there was a sentence that was being said by church leaders of all denominations across the country, and that was, “You know, we don’t have anybody between 18 and 35.” When they started paying attention to this increased dropout rate among young adults in church attendance, that opened up a discussion in the mid-’90s about Gen X. And so they starting bringing together young leaders in the Gen X category to talk about what was working in the church, what wasn’t working, what was going on.

After a couple of years some of these young Gen X guys said, “You know, it’s not really about a generation. It’s really about philosophy; it’s really about a cultural shift. It’s not just about a style of dress, a style of music, but that there’s something going on in our culture. And those of us who are younger have to grapple with this and live with this.” The term that they were using was the shift from modern to a postmodern culture. And so what began to happen — and as this thing had a life of its own, they said, “If it’s not just about Gen X, then we have to make sure that we get some older people who aren’t just in that age frame to talk about this.”

I had just written a book on the subject. That’s how I got involved, and it turned out that there were a number of us, all simultaneously thinking we were the only one talking about it and thinking and writing about it, who all around the same time were noticing the same phenomenon. So it was a very exciting coming together of these younger leaders and some of us a little bit older, saying, “This is our world, and this is the future. And the Christian faith and our individual churches, we’ve got to engage with and deal with it.”

Talk a little bit about what you see as some of these shifting cultural contexts that may be the hallmarks of this world that you’re trying to engage.

It is very hard to work with definitions of words like “modern” and “postmodern,” because different people use them in such different ways. And so if anybody assumes when one person uses the word “postmodern,” the other person means the same thing, it just creates all kinds of communication problems. But maybe here would be a way to say it. In my travels, where I speak and where people talk to me about my books, they say to me again and again, “The people who are the normal spokespeople for the Christian faith don’t speak for me. They don’t represent me.” There is something under the surface that they can’t quite put their words to. But they say, “That approach to faith is not my approach.” Now sometimes it’s political; it’s related to the religious Right and some of that rhetoric. But I think it’s not only the political side; it’s also a way that we engage with other people. It has to do with authority. I think, to some degree, there is a tendency that is inherited in the church for people to say, “Look, you already ought to agree with me, and if you don’t, you’re wrong. And so you better straighten up and fly right.” Whereas I think for those of us dealing in a more postmodern context, we realize it’s not people’s fault they don’t already agree with us. In some ways it’s our fault, because we haven’t done such a good job of a) living what we believe and b) explaining it in very sensible ways. So our approach is much more conversational and much more, maybe you could say, horizontal rather then top down.

What are some of the characteristics of the cultural context? What is it about the kind of culture that we have today in contemporary Western society?

Whenever we talk about the Christian faith engaging with culture, one of the temptations is that people feel that we’re sort of dumbing down, that the church is up here and the culture is down here, and we’re dumbing down our message, or we’re compromising, or lowering our standards to sort of match. That’s not what any of us are talking about. What often we hear is that people are saying, “Postmodern culture’s way down here, the church is up here, and you’re saying bring us down.” We’re saying, “No, actually what we think happened is that modern culture has been, in some ways, spiritually an arid place. It’s been spiritually a place that there wasn’t much room for authentic and communal spirituality. And so modernity brought us down.” We think that the church has, in many ways, already accommodated to modernity. And so the Christian message has become a product almost, and it and the methods of spreading it are like sales pitches. We feel that it has been individualized. It’s almost like we have personal computers, and now we have personal salvation. And there’s not so much attention to what’s going on in our world. What about the social dimensions of our faith, that sort of thing? What we’re trying to do is say, “We’ve already overaccommodated to modern culture. We’ve commodified our message; we’ve turned our churches into purveyors of religious goods and services.” And we’re saying, “No, how can faith in some ways break free from that to engage the issues that we believe the Christian gospel challenges us to?” And those are issues of loving God with our whole heart, mind, and strength and loving our neighbors as ourselves, which has profound implications on everything from ecology to racial reconciliation to how we spend money in our personal budgets and the national budget and that sort of thing.

In GENEROUS ORTHODOXY you raise a provocative question: “If Jesus were physically on earth today, would he want to be a Christian?” Would he?

Well, in the book I give kind of an equivocal answer. But the question, I think, is really, really a worthwhile question. For example, there’s been huge interest in the last couple of years in THE DA VINCI CODE. Now what’s so interesting is THE DA VINCI CODE explores a radically different picture of Jesus than the church has portrayed. But it’s fascinating that for millions of people, that picture of Jesus is actually more interesting and intriguing and in some ways morally compelling than the image that they feel they’re given by the church. I’m not saying I endorse THE DA VINCI CODE image at all. But I am saying that people feel a huge disconnect between the image of Jesus that they get from reading the Bible and the image of Christianity they get from the media, whether it’s in its more institutional forms or in its more grassroots forms. They just feel that those two don’t match. What I think many of us are concerned about is, how can we go back and get reconnected to Jesus with all of his radical, profound, far-reaching message of the kingdom of God?

I think it would be safe to say that everything we’re doing with the emerging conversation is summed up in saying, “What is the message of Jesus, and what is the message of the kingdom of God? What does that mean?” In many ways, what we feel has happened is the church has tended too often to be about institutional survival, which results in horrible things, from fund-raising scandals to covering up pedophilia scandals. When institutional survival is the purpose of the church — Jesus said it: “If you save your life you lose it. You can gain the world and lose your soul.” So the church starts to lose its soul. The church has been preoccupied with the question, “What happens to your soul after you die?” And that has resulted in, all too often, an abandonment of the ethics of the kingdom of God, the ethics of Jesus for this life and our history here and now.

In GENEROUS ORTHODOXY you’re pretty critical especially of the evangelical focus on personal salvation. Why does that trouble you? That is one of the basic concepts in many people’s theology in the evangelical church.

Well, first of all, I’m not at all against the idea of a personal relationship with God. I think that’s where it all begins. I think this is part of the beauty of the message of Jesus. Every individual is invited into a personal relationship with God. But personal is not private, so personal doesn’t just mean it’s me and God, or me and Jesus, but personal means that my connection to God also connects me to other people and connects me to what God is doing, the mission of God in our world.

When we end up in some ways commodifying and privatizing faith, it in many ways marginalizes faith and makes faith be either like a consumer product or like a personal preference. Or it makes us just be a demographic group that gets marketed to or manipulated by political parties or whatever else. But if people believe, as I do, that our Christian identity actually thrusts us into the world with a sense of mission, and it gives us a concern for the poor, it gives us concern for justice, all these very, very important things in our world today, the reconciliation with our neighbors and our enemies — if we believe we’re thrust into the world in this way, then our faith doesn’t just stay personal and private. It then engages us in the world.

You know, you could look at it like this: if becoming a Christian makes a person withdraw and isolate so that their focus is on what will happen to [them] after death, and makes them less involved in the problems and needs of this world here, today, every person who becomes a Christian in some ways is taken out of the game. But if being a Christian means converting from being part of the problem to being part of the solution, then every person who is a dynamic, growing Christian is engaged in the world as an activist on the cause of justice and peace.

Talking about this focus on what happens to your soul after death brings up the question of heaven and hell, which is very controversial. Your newest book also focuses very much on these things as well. I’ve talked to some folks who come away from reading your books saying, “Brian McLaren doesn’t believe in the traditional view of hell anymore.”

Well, you know, one theologian just wrote a review of my newest book, THE LAST WORD AND THE WORD AFTER THAT, and I thought he was very fair and very accurate. He said that my purpose in the book is not to demolish an old view or replace it with a new view. My purpose is to get conversation going about the old view and problems with it so that we can together move forward in reconsidering, and maybe there is a better understanding of what Jesus meant and what the scriptures mean when they’ve talked about issues like judgment, justice, hell, heaven, that sort of thing.

The way I’ve tried to describe what I’m trying to do is this way: let’s say you’re going down a road and you come to a T in the road. And there’s a sign, and it says if you turn left you get to Boston, and if you turn right you get to New York City. And I get to that T and I think, “You know what, I actually want to go to Los Angeles.” At that moment, my answer isn’t to turn left or to turn right, my answer is to turn around and rethink how I got to where I am now.

I think we’re in a similar situation in not just evangelical Christianity, but really in Western Christianity — that for a very long time we have been very preoccupied with the question, as if the reason for Jesus coming can be summed up in “Jesus is trying to help get more souls into heaven, as opposed to hell, after they die.” I just think a fair reading of the gospels blows that out of the water. I don’t think that the entire message and life of Jesus can be boiled down to that bottom line.

What is it about the traditional concept of hell that bothers contemporary people or that has brought us to this point?

There are so many different problems, I think, that come up with this. But one of the deepest problems is that — and nobody ever would intend this — but that for some people the traditional view of hell makes God look like a torturer. It makes God look like somebody who just can’t wait to torture you for everything you’ve done wrong. And then you sort of have this dark view of God and then maybe a better view of Jesus, because Jesus comes in and in some ways saves you from this dark side of God. But I’m very convinced by … the example of Jesus, the life of Jesus. He says, “God isn’t like that, God is like a father who loves His children.” Now that doesn’t mean that God says, “Oh, everything’s fine, whatever you want do is okay. Just have a good time,” because I’m a father and when my children would beat each other up, I’d be upset about that, you know. But I didn’t want to torture the one who did the wrong thing, I wanted to stop them from hurting their sibling and I wanted to teach them to change, so I think simultaneously we have to deemphasize this image of God as a torturer, but we have to raise our understanding that God cares about justice. And that suddenly comes home to those of us who are very religious, who are praying and singing, “God bless America.” God bless us. We’re already the richest, most powerful nation in the world, and we’re just saying, “God bless us more.” We’ve already got more weapons then anybody else, we’ve got more security than — “God bless us more.” Well, if we believe in a God of justice, at some point we’ve got to think, “If we’re so blessed, maybe we ought to be caring about the people in Darfur, the people in Eastern Congo, the people in the Middle East who are suffering this ongoing trouble.” And we ought to say, “How can we be agents of peace and reconciliation and rescue and help and service to other people, instead of just being preoccupied with our own blessing?”

That to me is very related to a view of a just God. And I think that there is some absolutely unintended collusion between a preoccupation with evading justice after this life and ignoring justice in this life. Now that’s not universal and it’s not intended, but it’s an unintended consequence of what I would say is an overemphasis on hell.

Many people are frustrated by that answer because they want a straightforward answer, and you don’t seem to enjoy giving straightforward answers.

Well, you know, a couple people tell me they think I’m being evasive, they think I’m a coward, I’m afraid to say what I really think. But here’s the interesting thing. I don’t think I’d be saying what I’m saying if I was a coward. And what I’m actually saying is a little more difficult. I’m saying, when they’re asking me to answer a certain question, I’m saying, “I don’t think that’s the right question. I think we should be asking another question.” I’m not saying that because I’m afraid of saying what I believe. I’m saying that because I’m trying to be faithful to God, I’m trying to be faithful to the teaching and example of Jesus. So it’s my fidelity to my understanding of the Christian message that makes me say sometimes, “We’re asking the wrong question.”

I think Jesus was in this situation a lot. People would come to him and ask him a question, and it just wasn’t the right question. And he had a way of asking them a question or telling them a story that suddenly took them in a different direction. I think many of our questions that we’re asking today are just the wrong questions, and I think this is one of the great examples of Jesus. He doesn’t just answer the questions people are asking; he raises new ones. I think we’d be in a much better shape today if people who are faithful to Christ started saying, “What are the most important questions? What are the biggest threats and problems, and what does the message of Jesus and the life and example of Jesus, what does it say about those issues?”

Let me read one quotation from GENEROUS ORTHODOXY to you: “We must continually be aware that the old, old story may not be the true, true story.” Can you understand why some evangelicals are nervous when they hear that kind of language?

Yes, I certainly understand why they’re nervous, and to tell you the truth, these questions that I’m raising, that I’ve been grappling with for about 15, 16 years pretty intensely myself, they made me nervous, too. I’m very sympathetic. But I look back in history, and I think, you know, for a long time people who believed in Jesus, believed in the Bible, either tolerated or actively defended slavery. I grew up, you know, in the 1950s and ’60s, in an era when people who were very committed to the Bible, very committed to Jesus, were also very committed to segregation. I heard a lot of Christian people defend racism based on a Bible verse. So I think ethically, out of faithfulness to God and especially when we’re historically even marginally awake to history, we’ve got to realize that people in the name of the Christian faith have done some horrible things. We always have to be open to places where we’re wrong. And maybe this is one of the real problems, that if the public Christian voice is always telling everybody else to repent but it’s never applying that to itself, then in a certain way we’re violating Jesus’ teaching. We’re worried about the splinters in everybody else’s eye when we have boards in our own. That’s what I’m trying to do. I’m trying to say, “Look, we have some boards in our own. We have some things in our own vision that maybe need some attention.”

Are there truths related to the faith that we can know, that we can be certain about?

Well, first of all, when we talk about the word “faith” and the word “certainty,” we’ve got a whole lot of problems there. What do we mean by “certainty”? If I could substitute the word “confidence,” I’d say yes, I think there are things we can be confident about, and those are the things we have to really work with. This is one of the concerns that some people who are critical of my work have, and I understand their concern. Their concern is they feel you have a choice between certainty and a lack of confidence. Well, I think that there is a proper level of confidence. For example, the people who are sure that white supremacy was justifiable based on the Bible — they were certain about it. I don’t think they had many second thoughts about it. The Europeans who spread around the world and stole lands from the first nations, the native peoples of Africa, North America, South America, Asia — they had no shortage of confidence. They were certain that they were allowed to go and take everybody’s lands and, I mean, the results were horrific for hundreds of years.

So certainty can be dangerous. What we need is a proper confidence that’s always seeking the truth and that’s seeking to live in the way God wants us to live, but that also has the proper degree of self-critical and self-questioning passion. And that’s not a passion for being wishy-washy or, what was the word in the last election, to be a “flip-flopper.” It is a passion to say, “We might be wrong, and we are always going to stay humble enough that we’ll be willing to admit that.” I don’t see that as a lack of fidelity to the teaching of the Bible. I see that as trying to follow the teaching of the Bible. It has a lot of positive things to say about humility.

I believe G. K. Chesterton said something like this — that if we try to get all truth into our head, we will pare the truth down to fit into our head. The goal isn’t to try to fit it into our head. We’re limited. You can’t fit something infinite into your head. But the goal is, can we get our head into the truth? Another way to say it is I think truth can be apprehended; it can be touched. But can truth, especially truth about things like God — that can’t be contained. You could say it can be apprehended but not fully comprehended. And this, of course, is the deep tradition of the church. The church has always said that God is a mystery. The church has always said that our very best words about God fall short. So there is always the sense that the ultimate goal of worship is wonder and humility and awe. When we make it sound like we have all the bolts screwed down tight and all the nails hammered in and everything’s all boxed up and we’ve got it all figured, at that moment, I think we have stopped being faithful and we have in some ways created what one theologian calls a “graven ideology.” It’s an idol of our own conceptions.

A lot of critics are really frustrated that homosexuality is a question you’re not very definitive on. Why do you not want to go on the record on that?

That’s a great question, and we could talk for hours about this. I think, as I said before, when an issue is badly framed, we’re not wise to just rush in and try to answer it. And I think the issue of homosexuality is badly framed. One of my concerns about the framing of it is that I’m worried that the religious community is being manipulated by the political world and that the political community, in some ways, has decided this is a wedge issue, and we can use this issue to shave off voters from one party or another party. And so they’ve wanted the issue to be a political issue. I’m worried that the religious community has been manipulated by some of this political machination. I don’t mean that as a conspiracy theory, but I just mean let’s be realistic about how these things work. It seems to me it’s worked that way; that’s the first thing.

The second thing is that the issue of homosexuality is so complex, and as a pastor I have to sit across the table from people, from a young man who’s raised in a wonderful Christian family and says, “Look, you know, I’m 19 years old. I’ve never been attracted to women. I didn’t ask for this. I’ve been ashamed to tell anybody. You’re the first person I’ve ever told.” Well, when I have a conversation like that, or with a young woman who grew up — her father is a minister, and she lived with this deep self-hatred for many, many years. She considered suicide and all the rest. When you have conversations like that, you can’t just walk around making pronouncements like so many people in the media do. You realize these are real human beings we’re talking about. And you realize that the issues are not as simple as many people make them sound. Then add to that the biblical dimension of it and the way of interpreting the Bible that yields these very easy, black-and-white [answers], throw people in this plastic bin or in that plastic bin and now we got them sorted out, here are the good ones, here are the bad ones. You know, I just think that’s absurd. The Bible’s so much more complex then that. If people want to start picking out a verse from the Bible here and picking out a verse there, and picking out a verse, we’re going have stonings going on in the street. It’s a crazy way to interpret the Bible, in my opinion. Now that doesn’t mean that we just throw out the Bible, but we’ve got to learn ways to engage with the wisdom in the Bible that help us be more ethical and more humane and not less. So that would be, you know, one whole dimension of this.

In some ways homosexuality is the tip of the iceberg, and underneath, what’s not showing, is this huge issue that theologians would call anthropology. What is our view of humanity? For centuries and centuries in the Western church there has been an anthropology of dualism, that the body is like a machine and the soul is like a little ghost that lives in the machine. Soul and body are separated. But one of the things that’s going on in our world right now is a profound rethinking of that because we are learning, you know, through the study of mental illness, psychiatry, psychopharmacology, that body and soul are far more integrated than we thought in the past. That has implications on so many things. Let me just give one quick example. In the Bible you will not find the category of mental illness. There’s nothing in the Bible about schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, multiple personality disorder. You won’t find Asperger’s syndrome or autism in the Bible.

The thing that you will find in the Bible that’s closest to any of those things is demon possession. So if we say, “Well, the only way to be faithful to the Bible is not to give Lithium or Haldol or Prozac, or whatever, it’s only to do exorcism” — well, I mean, we would be brutalizing people. It would be ridiculous to treat people that way. I think that’s a bit of what we’re dealing with underneath the surface with homosexuality. We’re dealing with the fact that human beings are far more integrated body-soul units than we’ve realized in the past, and this is the deeper issue.

In the past, when the Christian faith grapples with major issues in our worldview like this, it takes centuries to deal with. So the idea that we have to have a solution and a definitive answer by yesterday on a complex issue is, to me, just unrealistic. It’s not going to happen that fast; we’ve got to have extended dialogue. I believe it’s possible to have Christians with different views on this issue behave charitably and work together. A lot of people say it’s impossible. I believe it’s possible.

Several of you who are part of the emergent conversation put out a letter to your critics addressing concerns raised about your view of Scripture. What is your view of Scripture?

The church from the very beginning has struggled with the issue of authority. In the early church you had apostles and false apostles duking it out; who’s right? And you have a lot of arguments in the documents of the New Testament where you realized there was conflict. Who has the legitimate right to speak authoritatively for the way of Jesus?

And then in the early centuries of the church you have an ongoing struggle between various leading cities, and eventually in the West Rome predominates, but in the East — you know, the Eastern Orthodox Church never is comfortable with that. Eventually by about 1000 you have an official rift, and then you have a rift between Catholics and Protestants. There have been these struggles — who has the authoritative message and the right to say the way things are and the way things will be for the Christian faith? For the last 500 years in the Protestant world, we have said the Bible tells us how things are and how things will be. The problem is that people interpret the Bible so differently. And so we end up with this, I think, naiveté that if we think the Bible tells us something without us doing any interpretation, we’re kind of, it’s like me sort of not realizing I actually do have a pair of glasses on, I do have an interpretive grid. I have a way of seeing.

The battle that’s going on right now is all of us believe — I don’t hear any of us saying, “Throw out the Bible,” you know, people have said that over the last couple of hundred years, and that doesn’t lead anywhere. If you throw out the Bible, all you have left is to be conformed to your culture, and you’re not going to have anything new to say than what everybody else is saying. I don’t see the great value in that; that seems to me a huge step down. None of us want to throw out the Bible. But what we do want to do is become more savvy and more aware of our interpretive grids that we bring to the Bible.

One good way to think about the Bible, for me, is to think of it as the scrapbook or the memorabilia, the essential documents that tell us the story of people who believed in one true, living, just, holy, loving, merciful God. It’s not like there are 25 traditions about it. There’s one, it’s the tradition that begins with Abraham, goes through Moses and David and comes to Jesus, and continues to us today. What those documents do is they give us, in my view, a kind of trajectory, a sense of development, a path of the way that God wants things to go. When you real all the details of the Bible, you see things go up and down and all the rest. But there seems to be a trajectory and a path. What that does for me is it helps me — let’s say the last of the New Testament documents ends about 100, somewhere in that range. Well, that sets this trajectory. And maybe I’m out here, but now I know if the trajectory’s going like this, I want to position myself here … and it helps me aim for a continuing trajectory so that we can live in our day in ways that are pleasing to God and are good for God’s dreams for the world.

Are you surprised at the extent to which you’ve really become a target and at the enthusiasm with which some people in the church have been criticizing and dissecting some of your writings?

I grew up in a church that would broadly be considered fundamentalist; I grew up in a sector of the church that was more in the world of fundamentalism. They’re wonderful people, and they love God, and they’d be wonderful people to have as your neighbors; they’re great people. I have great resources from my heritage in a very conservative sector of a conservative part of Christianity. I thank God for my heritage. One of the things I gained from my heritage is an understanding that there is a lot of vigorous debate, especially in the fundamentalist sectors, and the language gets pretty hot pretty fast sometimes. I have tried to not indulge in that kind of language myself. I don’t think that’s the best way to conduct dialogue. Sometimes the language is intended to shut down dialogue, and I think that’s not a good thing.

But overall, because I understand how that works, and I’ve seen a lot of it in my life, I’m more impressed by how charitably I’ve been treated. I think a lot of people could have been a lot rougher on me. I think deep down, for many of them, there’s a certain sense of hope. They’re saying, “We hope you don’t go too far, but we think maybe you’re doing something good to stretch the envelope.”

I’ll give you just an example. One very outspoken critic of mine said to me, “I don’t like what you’re writing. I don’t agree with you, but in a weird way I hope you succeed because my son will never, ever practice the kind of Christianity I practice, but he loves what you’re doing. And I think maybe a person like you is the only person who’s paving the way for a faith that my son can live, even though I want no part of it myself.” I think there’s a good bit of that going on, and I’m not the only one who’s doing that. There are people like Bishop N. T. Wright and Walter Brueggemann and so many important theologians. In many ways I’m kind of a translator of theologians into, you know, common, more accessible language. But so many people are paving the way for this, I think.

You don’t feel like you’ve become a target in some way?

Well, I certainly have become a target for some people. For example, it’s a little disturbing to see people writing reviews of my books on Amazon or whatever and it’s clear they’ve never read the book. There becomes a group of people who are just out to, you know, now I’m identified as a bad guy, so they’re trying to sort of join the cause and making me look bad or whatever else. Those things happen. There’s a bit of controversy, but you know, I’ve never really counted this up, but I bet there might be hundreds of positive e-mails and letters and comments I receive for every negative one. It’s just that some of the negative ones have been placed by well-known people.

Do you enjoy pushing the envelope?

Well, this is the irony. I’m kind of an introvert by nature. I’m sort of an artistic temperament by nature. I’m not a fighter. But I think I’ve always been a curious person. When I was a little kid I was fascinated, like a lot of little boys are, you know, with dinosaurs and with animals and wildlife. And I read everything I could. I’ve always had this thirst for knowledge. I think that’s maybe the thing that keeps me going. I really want to try to understand what’s going on. I have this curiosity. And when certain people say, “You can’t think that,” or “You can’t ask that,” or “You can’t explore that,” there’s part of me that says, “I don’t really have that option to just turn off my brain and turn off my curiosity.” I mean, if God gave me a brain, I don’t think it’s especially honoring to God to just sort of say, “In order to fit in this social setting and not get criticized, I better, you know, just inhibit it and put it in a box and put it on the shelf.”

How has all of this exploration and conversation affected your personal faith?

I came to a very strong Christian commitment in my teenage years. It was a combination of questioning and sort of spiritual experience that brought me to that. In my experiences, and I think for many other people, there is kind of a personal and very hard to explain, you know, deep — and maybe I could use the word “mystical,” probably the word “spiritual” is better — but an experiential side of faith. And then there’s a rational side, and sometimes one gets ahead of the other and sometimes one pulls the other back. I’ve lived with that dynamic tension, as I think a lot of people do.

In the early 1990s I hit what has been, so far, the biggest crisis in my faith. I’d been a college English teacher. I left teaching. I was working in pastoral ministry for about four or five years by that time. And so now I’m in the role of a pastor and I have to get up and preach every Sunday. But I started having some pretty deep questions. Now those questions, in some ways, came from the people who were attending my church. We started attracting a lot of people who were not lifelong churchgoers. And they would come and make an appointment and they’d say, “Boy, you know, I’ve been coming here for six months, and I never used to believe in God. Now I’m starting to believe in God, but I got these questions.” And they would give me their questions, and their questions were different than the questions I had and the questions all the books I read were about. Those questions really set me on a search. I would say that in 1994, ’95, ’96 I wasn’t sure, in fact I was quite sure that I was not going to stay in ministry. I just thought … “The tide of questions is rising faster then I can keep up with.” By about ’96, ’97 I started being able to, in some ways, disentangle my faith from certain systems of thought. And I found out that my faith actually would thrive better without being stuck in those systems of thought. And so I’m very hopeful now. I’m so glad now, but in ’96, ’95 — those were tough years. Maybe that’s why I’m sensitive to people who go through spiritual crisis. I’ve been through it a couple times myself.

What are some of the characteristics of an emerging church worship service, gathering, community, whatever you want to call it, that would indeed resonate with someone who is very much a product of today’s culture?

Well, my good friend Dr. Leonard Sweet, who’s been a huge inspiration to many of us, has a really nice way of summing it up. He uses a little acrostic around E-P-I-C: experiential, participatory, image-based, and communal.

Experiential meaning it’s not just a matter of coming and sitting in a pew and enduring 50 or 70 or whatever minutes of observing something happen. But it’s saying, “I want to experience God. I’m interested in coming into an experience here.” Participatory — I don’t want to just sit in my seat and watch other people do religious things up there. If there’s prayer being involved, I actually want to pray. If there’s singing involved, I want to participate. And it also involves getting our bodies involved so that here, for Protestants who’ve shied away increasingly from things like kneeling and things like receiving Communion and all the rest, there [is] renewed interest in spiritual practices that I participate in.

Image-based — we’ve been very word-and-concept based in the Protestant tradition for a long time, so that the centerpiece of the service is a long sermon. But to be image-based means there’s a huge increase in the valuing of the arts. So there might be a painting that is part of, actually, the message. “Let’s look at this painting and exegete the painting in a certain way, or appreciate the painting, or a sculpture, or interior design,” that sort of thing — great appreciation for the arts and things that relate to images and inspire the imagination.

And then communal — that we actually want to be connected with people. We don’t just want to come in and sit in long rows and just look at the front, and have as little contact with anybody else and as much contact with maybe the religious professional up front. But no, we want to actually be connected with the people and be part of the community. We come to believe that faith is actually, if I could say it this way, it’s a team sport. It’s not just a solo thing; it’s something we’re connected with other people in.

But in many of the worship experiences in this emerging church there is a strong individualistic element as well. Is there a paradox here, because people in some ways pick what works for them — if it works for you to paint up front, you can do that, or if it works for you to do this or that? You have people in some ways gathered together, but having a very individualistic, unique experience.

Yes. Well, life is so complex like that, isn’t it? There seems to be opposite things going on at the same time. And in one sense to have everybody sitting in rows, not moving, all looking forward, you could say that’s a highly communal experience. Everybody’s doing the same thing at the same time. But in a certain way, everybody’s individualism is inhibited, and they’re all rendered into this sort of nameless, amorphous mass. And in a way it does increase community when, for example, one of my favorite moments in my church, in our church service, is when I’m sitting there and other people are coming forward to receive Communion. I look at the people coming forward and I see tall people, and short people, and people of different races and economic backgrounds. I see people with Ph.D.s and G.E.D.s, and there’s something of the experience of seeing the people do things as individuals that helps me connect to them more as a community. So I think there are paradoxical things there. The fact is there is always a gravity in our culture toward commodifying and turning everything into a consumer, an individual consumer product. Will, you know, these churches involved in this emergent conversation, will they suddenly rise above that? Of course not; it’s pervasive. You know, it’s everywhere in our culture. It’s something we all struggle with.

Are we as individuals qualified to select what works for us within that setting? Are we the best judges always of what we get the most meaning from?

It’s a great question. It’s probably another one of those both-and questions. I think there are people who are gifted to be leaders and liturgists, they’re gifted in their skill just as a journalist develops skills and what are the good questions to ask, what are the issues that need to be addressed. People say, “Look, there are things we need to do when we get together,” and they have a guiding role in helping make sure those things happen.

I’ll give you an example. One of the things I really value in very traditional worship is the confession of sin. Now for some people that’s morbid, and they say it’s all about guilt. I don’t see it that way. I see the confession of sin as something we do as a community, as a constant reminder that we’re just all a bunch of losers, that none of us are all that great, none of us can – should — consider ourselves better then anybody else. There’s a kind of communal humbling in a confession of sin and a realization that we all need mercy from God and we should give mercy to each other.

Well, if a group of people say, “Oh we don’t like to think about sin, that’s negative, let’s just forget about it,” I think that’s a mistake, and we need gifted liturgists who will guide people in that, back into those things that, over time, they’ve proven themselves nourishing to the soul. Another really important author in this whole emergent conversation has been Dr. Robert E. Webber. A term that he has used is “ancient-future.” Ironically, as we move into the future, we find ourselves reaching back for more of these elements of our deep Christian tradition, and I see that as a very healthy thing.

One thing that’s really obvious in the emergent conversation is how much everybody hates labels. Everybody’s a postconservative or a postliberal, or a “post” this or “post” that. What is it about these labels that just doesn’t seem to be working anymore?

Great question. My friend Jim Wallis recently wrote a book called GOD’S POLITICS, and I love the subtitle:WHY THE RIGHT GETS IT WRONG AND THE LEFT DOESN’T GET IT. There’s this feeling in the political world and in the religious world that a lot of our polarities are now paralyzing us. So for example, if Left and Right politically are paralyzed in fighting each other, you know, we’ve got 300,000 or 400,000 people dead in Darfur in Sudan, and these people are fighting each other. We have to stop being paralyzed in our polarization, and we have to start working together to help some other people.

A lot of us feel that these categorizations are very effective to keep us fighting with each other, and we’d like to get beyond that and do something more productive. I was speaking in another city yesterday, and I made one statement and a young woman — I’m going to guess 23, 24 years old — came up to me afterward and she said, “That one sentence is what describes my spiritual life.” What I had said was more and more of us are feeling that if we have a version of the Christian faith that does not make us the kind of people that make this a better world, we really want no part of it. We actually believe that it’s right for us to have a faith that makes us the kind of people that help make this a better world. She said, “That’s me.”

I fear that what happens in our polarization is we stop saying, “Am I becoming a person who’s more Christlike? Am I becoming a person who’s more a part of God’s mission?” And we think, “Am I being a good conservative, or am I being a good liberal, or am I being a good Protestant or a good Catholic?” And, you know, that can end up really being a colossal adventure in missing the point.

How important has the Web, the Internet, and especially blogging been to this emergent conversation?

I’m 49, and for me, I live on the Internet. I mean, e-mail is my main mode of communication. But I know that for me, still, there is a certain kind of secondary sense to cyberspace. For me, television is still my native technology, and this is sort of a new technology. But we have to realize that for emerging generations, the Internet is their native technology, and so it really is transforming things.

One of the positive effects it’s had for the emergent conversation is that it’s global immediately. So there are people in Malaysia and all across Africa, Latin America, who suddenly can find out there are other people grappling with these issues, and there could be wonderful interchanges. It crosses denominational lines. It just has a wonderful way of helping people find each other that I think is very, very positive.

Blogging has been very, very important for this because it helps people express themselves. And a great thing about blogging is most bloggers have comment sections, you know, so there can be debate and dialogue. Sometimes it’s pretty combative and strident and pugilistic, and I don’t like all that kind of religious fighting language. But, on the other hand, it’s great that there’s space for people to passionately engage with issues they care about. We need that space, and cyberspace is providing a lot of it.

Can it also provide an endless conversation that’s just exhausting and never goes anywhere?

Well, this is one of the great dangers, and something I hope that bloggers themselves will pay attention to: that if you spend day after day, week after week blogging about what we ought to do for the poor and you never actually get out and do anything, you can have entered into a new kind of — what some people call the “paralysis of analysis.” Eventually probably what everybody ought to do, whether it’s a writer like me, we ought to say, “Let’s put the books down, and let’s actually go do something for somebody and not just talk about it.”

Are you still reluctant to call this a movement?

One of my hesitancies about calling it a movement is that I think it would be a shame for something to move forward until it has the right people in the gene pool, so to speak. I think we’ve got a lot of wonderful people in the gene pool. But I think there needs to be a lot more diversity. In the really big scheme of things, we’re at a moment now that is really unprecedented in Christian history. The majority of Christians in the world live in the global south. For the first time in Christian history, Africa, Latin America, and Asia, in many ways, are the center of Christian faith. The former colonies now are, in many ways, the center of gravity, not the former colonizers from Europe and North America. This is just a huge moment, and one of the things I’m especially interested in, and that I’m devoting a lot of my energy to in the next couple of years, is how can we find the young emerging leaders from the global south and the ones from the global north and have a global conversation about what the Christian faith should be? When that happens, that will be a great time to talk about a movement. It’s happening, but it takes time. Even with the Internet it takes time for these relationships to happen. It’s not just a matter of exchanging words. Something happens when people get together face to face and they share meals together, and I get to walk their streets and they get to walk my streets. And when we understand one another’s world, and we say, “This is God’s world and this is our world, and let’s try to figure out how we can be good stewards and caretakers and servants of God’s mission in this world, with north and south, east and west together,” that will be a great time to talk about a movement.

Certainly your critics have outlined a number of their concerns, but what are your worries or concerns? What do you see as the biggest challenges that face this conversation in the near future?

Whatever this thing is that’s developing — it’s not just about emergent; it’s a very, very broad thing. The Catholics are feeling it, mainline Protestants, evangelicals, charismatics — many, many sectors of the church are feeling it. And my biggest concern is that, if we were to say what is the very best thing that could happen, you know, let’s say that’s a 10 on what could happen, it would be relatively easy to get to a four or a five, but how can we really get up there to seize the opportunity of this moment? The moment involves so many things that have not done well for a long time. How do we integrate a real concern for evangelism and making authentic disciples of Jesus Christ? How do we integrate that with real concern for social justice and real concern for peace and reconciliation in our world? [That’s a] huge issue. How do we help Christians maintain an authentic, deeply rooted, Christ-centered Christian identity and engage in meaningful dialogue with members of other world religions and with people with no religion? How do we engage in dialogue? We don’t have a great history of that. We need that, and we need to practice that. Some people are more advanced at that than others, but sometimes the people who have had the most experience in engaging in dialogue do so by, in some ways, minimizing their own faith identity. So this is a new challenge: how do we maintain our identity and engage in fruitful dialogue? A major issue.

Then I think we’re faced with issues like HIV/AIDS in Africa, the floods of orphans and the flood of economic crises that’s going to happen in Africa just because of HIV/AIDS. We’re dealing with this sort of historic cultural struggle between what I would call a kind of medieval Islam and a very modern — in some ways still colonial — Christianity, and how can we engage in helping that become not a world-engulfing crisis? So many huge issues.

Another huge one is the loss of faith or the loss at least of religious practice in Europe. How can we help Europeans — and intellectual, blue-state Americans — to rediscover a faith that’s authentic and real and vital and that helps us move forward in the future? All of those are huge issues. It would be a good thing if we helped revitalize a lot of our churches, but to me that’s like a four or a five. But if we see this thing turn into something that has real implications for health and well-being in our world, that to me has a lot of the feel of God’s will being done on earth as it is in heaven, which is something all of us Christians pray for.

]]>Read more of Kim Lawton’s interview about the emerging church with Doug Pagitt, pastor of Solomon’s Porch in Minneapolis and author of REIMAGINING SPIRITUAL FORMATION (Zondervan):

Why was the traditional way of “doing church” not resonating for you?

From my vantage point, at least, I think that we really are quite traditional in one sense, because I think what we’re doing is what those who have gone before us have also done. So while we’re not doing precisely the same model or the same feel or the same sound or the same look, we are trying to figure out in our day what Christianity would mean for us. And so in that way we’re much like the first century or the nineteenth century or the twenty-first century, so we’re trying to figure out what would it mean for us to live out the hopes and dreams and aspirations of God in the way of Jesus in our world, and trying to organize ourselves in a way that would make sense for us. You know, there’s people who tend to think that Christianity has one way of going and one way of functioning and one way of organizing itself, and that’s just simply not the case. From the very beginning Christianity has been a disparate religion; it doesn’t mandate one language, it doesn’t mandate one culture, it doesn’t mandate one way of meeting. We really are doing what’s very normal for Christians, and that’s to find ways for us to meet and to gather and to try to be shaped in the way of God in the setting that we find ourselves in. So it’s not like we looked at something and we said, “Well, those people are doing something wrong and we’re going to make it better.” We said we needed to do something that really is honest and representative of the lives that we’re currently living today. So we became, you know, an active part in the creation of the kind of church that we want to be in.

What are some of the characteristics that help you express Christianity today in this culture and time?

The hallmarks of our expression of Christianity, of course, aren’t stagnant either, right? So that’s kind of something changing. I’ll try to speak as honestly as I can, but that may change at some point as well. But for us, meeting in the round is kind of an important thing. Part of it has to do with how we understand our community and how we’re going to relate to one another. So to be face to face in our weekly meeting is an important thing. We’re trying to live lives that are open to one another, that are face to face, that are inclusive of other people’s lives in our pursuit with God. So meeting face to face is important. For it to be representative of our community and to come from us matters. So we write our own music, we create our own prayer, we do use a number of elements from the church throughout history. We’ll recite creeds, we will borrow prayers and invocations, we will use the scriptures quite regularly and frequently and in-depth. But we’re also trying to say what are the words that we would put around it? In some ways we’re trying to figure out how we would leave, you know, something of value to our own children’s children. So they will look back and ask what their great-grandparents did in the twenty-first century, back when things seemed easier, I’m sure, from their vantage point.

So to meet face to face, to create our own language, to create our own expression really matters to us. To have creativity and art and beauty matters. It’s more important for us to feel like we’re representing a beautiful expression of our life with God than it is to be right about everything. Some people hear that, and it just sounds like, “Well, that’s just going to go down the road of all kinds of trouble.” I guess it could, but what I am certain of is that churches who have tried to be right about everything have also gone down a road full of all kinds of trouble. So it’s not like were choosing a road of peace and a road of trouble; it seems that there’s trouble on both sides, and we would just as soon be careful about being a people of peace and of beauty and of goodness and not have to be right about everything, so there’s as much an attitude of sharing and of dialogue and of input and of the people who are here actually having a part to play in what we’re doing.

You know, for Protestants the notion of the priesthood of the believer was an important part of the Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and it seems that in a lot of ways that goes by as an unfunded mandate for the church. We talk about it and never put any resources behind making it happen. We’re working really hard at trying to make the priesthood of the believer mean something not only in our Sunday gathering but throughout the course of what it means to be a church, and I’ll tell you that comes with a lot of cost, and it’s much more difficult than it is to just set aside a few people to make all the decisions and ask everyone else to fall into line.

Why is it more difficult?

It’s difficult to involve everyone in the life of a church because people think differently, and part of the beauty of a community is the diversity. We’re not all the same. We don’t think the same, we don’t vote the same, we don’t shop at the same stores, we don’t raise our children in the same way, we don’t come from the same families. So you bring all of this together into one meeting, and you say to people, “Well, what should we do?” And when the conversation shifts from what would I do, what would I like, to what would we do and what’s best for us, this becomes a different question, and now we have to put together the structures and the mechanisms to include as many people as possible in that, believing that all people have the spirit of God in them and can be led by God. So there’s no chance that one person gets to say. “Well, I have an education, or I have a level of experience, therefore I speak for God and you don’t.” I can say, “I speak for God and so do you.” So now we have to negotiate even that.

Fortunately, we’re in good company throughout the life of the church. Churches tried to figure this out in local congregations and across the world for centuries. But it’s a difficult thing because to move together means giving up something. You don’t get to move as quickly; you’re not able to make decisions as clean. We probably waste a lot of time and energy. But it’s really not a waste in my view because we’re doing something collectively, and we’re doing something together, and it seems that’s more in harmony with what God would have us to do. If God invites us to be co-creators with God in the life of the world, which I think God does, then to look at other people as co-creators with God is just what you do.

So we have to figure out how to organize ourselves, and some of that means running against the flow in what the church expects and what the people expect. One of the real struggles in involving people in the life of the church and feeling that they’re a part of it is that people don’t want that. There’s an awful lot of people who want to go to church and have a service provided for them; to be serviced in some way and to engage in a religious activity and then to go and hope that those people who run the religious service will be there again next week so that they can engage in it again. When you say to them, “No, you’re a part of this,” it changes their mindset. It’s like if someone were to go out to a restaurant and they were to sit down and they placed their order and the waiter said, “Well, get up and go into the kitchen and make your food then.” They think, “No, I’m at a restaurant. I come to these places because I don’t want to make my own food.” There are an awful lot of people who want to go to church because they don’t want to do their own spirituality. When they come, and we start saying to them, “No, this is a place where you take on greater responsibility for your spiritual life and for the spiritual lives of those around you,” it changes the relationship a little bit. We’ve had to work hard to renegotiate what it means to be a part of a community where your involvement is a necessity and isn’t just something to do if you’re sort of more involved than others, but it’s the baseline.

Is everyone qualified to do that? Are some people in a place where they shouldn’t be determining the spirituality of a group?

Qualification for involvement in other people’s spiritual life is a big deal. Not every opinion is equally valid, and that’s just simply the case. Some people just don’t know as much as others do. That’s what makes it work; you have to now determine whose opinion really does matter on a particular topic. I think you always have a leader. Anytime you have a group of people together, someone’s the leader. But it doesn’t have to be the same person all the time, leading on every topic and leading in the same way. Leadership can move. It can rotate, but someone’s always going to have leadership. That’s part of what give-and-take means. I’m the pastor of our community, but that doesn’t mean that I’m this most qualified on every topic and every subject. There may be a case in which someone is better qualified for that situation but not for something else, and how do we find a way to get them engaged in the place where they’re best qualified, but not having to have all the power to be involved in everything else? That’s the part that makes this an awful lot of work. it would just be easier to say someone decided years ago who was going to make these decisions, and that’s just what we’re going to do. This is a big conversation in a lot of churches, especially churches that talk in the emergent-esque kind of language — that experience is really important. For us, the kind of experience we want to get after is people actually become full participants, not just where they have some experiential activity that takes place, but where they actually become the people who say, “This is my community and I am engaged and I’m involved in all of this.” So what we mean by experiential life is that when someone becomes a part of our community, we’ve actually become a new community. We’re not just the same people with more members. We’re now a new people in some way. We have to be shaped and changed as a new people, because now we have more folks that are a part of it. And so we’re constantly adjusting, and it’s not major adjustments, and it’s not a total reworking of everything. It’s not chaos, but it does mean that it constantly changes and adjusts. We’re not the same people that we were six years ago when we started, and we won’t be the same people six years from now. We find ourselves at a particular place in time trying to figure out how do we do this in the midst of our life now?

What are some of the connections between current cultural trends and what you are doing at Solomon’s Porch?

Cultural trends don’t tend to run evenly across all of culture. They tend to pop up in places, in ways different than other places. I think part of what’s happened in the grand scheme in last 30 years or so is that individual people have felt more empowered to make decisions for their life and for the lives of those they care for than they used to, in relationship to institutions. There’s a grand shift away from organization and institution being right, and individuals and collections of people with a voice have as much power and as much say. We are definitely a reflection of that. There’s not doubt about it; that’s just the water that we swim in. We are people who tend to think we matter, and our voice matters, and our opinion matters. Even in we’re not all that educated, even if we’re not as qualified as someone else, [it] doesn’t exclude that voice from the conversation. That’s definitely a piece of it.

A place where I think we’re a little countercultural to some of the trends is there’s been a strong move toward an individualization of spirituality, where each person has their own individual spiritual life, and you utilize other people as they would be an added resource or benefit to you. But the idea of collective spirituality, where it’s still personal, where people are personally engaged and it matters to them in their life, to somehow connect the personal life with the corporate life is a bit countercultural; it’s a hard thing to do. We’re having to say to people, “Look, you matter, but you’re not the only one who matters.” And there’s an awful lot of cultural trend and cultural pressure toward people gathering in large groups of people so that you can sort of get the greatest value for your resources, but then to have individual experiences together. One of the reasons we meet in the round is that we want people to know that other folks are around and that they matter. It’s not just them all alone. But there’s an awful lot of trendy Christian spirituality that really individualizes everything. You get into the room, it’s very dark, you close your eyes, you separate from everyone, sort of light it with candles, and it really doesn’t matter who’s around you. We’re trying to create a bit of a countercultural experience saying it does matter who’s around you, and that person wrote the song, and this person’s prayer — they wrote the prayer, and this pastor, you’ve been to the pastor’s house and you know the children and this is very personal in that sense without being individual.

I think there’s also a sense of individual creativity that we’re tapping into. It’s a big cultural trend, you know, that people have their own Web sites, their own Web logs; they create their own music lists, they create their own art. There’s very much a sense of people’s personal creativity, and we try to be a community that allows for personal creativity to become a part of our collective experience.

I think that there’s this cultural trend of “casual” that’s taken over large parts of our society. You see it in clothing, workplaces and I think it’s happened in the church some — that there’s very much a relaxed feel, and not just a southern California sort of relaxed feel, but a sense that true spirituality can also be comfortable and can be normal. But there’s an awful lot of our people who still want a formal element to it, so we have some elements of formality that we do because it feels right. But the formality tends to be the occasional, and the casual tends to be more normative. That’s something our community reflects, and that fits us and probably is much the product of the culture that we live in.

Many folks in this movement use the label “post” a lot: post-conservative, post-liberal, post-evangelical. Why? What does that mean?

Well, in the emergent conversation there’s a lot of use of the word “post,” and it’s a bit of a cop-out, frankly, because “post” means after, but it’s the opposite of the word “pre-.” “Pre-” means that which is before, what’s about to come, a thing just preceeding. “Post-” means the thing that follows. People have been quite comfortable describing the cultural shift in North America and, really, around the world, and I can speak more fully about North America. The shift in North America is unclear at this point what it is, so the use of the word “post” means after — doesn’t mean “anti-,” doesn’t mean “against.” It means the thing that comes after. And so for someone to refer to themselves as postmodern or as post-evangelical, or as post-mainline or as post-Christian — these are words that mean not against, but after. People are trying to say, “Yes, we understand what it means to be a modern person, we understand what it means to be an evangelical, we understand what it means to be a mainline church person, we understand what it means to be a Christian.” But what exactly does it mean if you’re not quite that anymore, like that was a good place to start but it’s not the place that you want to finish? What words do you put around that? In some ways it’s a cop-out and in some ways it’s honest, because no one wants to try to be the one to coin the expression and to coin the phrase.

In fact, five years ago or so when numbers of us started using the phrase “emergent” to describe the conversation that we were trying to have, it was in reaction to the postmodern language. We wanted to stop using that word. It didn’t seem helpful any longer in this discipline. Postmodern is an effective word in certain disciplines, but it seemed that in the world of religion it had sort of run its course, and so we tried to create a new one. As soon as that happens, of course, you have detractors and those who want to make it better, and you have people who are trying to fix it all along.

It’s a bit of a cop-out, but it’s also a humble stance to try to say, “We know we’re after something that’s quite defined, but we’re moving into a period of time that’s much less defined, and we’re hopeful that we’re going to be as faithful in our day as those who went before us were in their day.

What is emerging — from where to where?

Five years ago or so when numbers of us started using this phrase “emergent,” there were a number of reasons why we thought this word worked well. The reason I was most excited about it is the use in a forestry term or an agriculture term. Emergent growth is the growth in a forest that is growing below the surface, that if you were to knock away the dead pine needles and leaves and branches, you would see the growth that’s happening there. The health of a forest is determined by the health of the emergent growth, the growth that’s about to come up. In farming, people talk a lot about applying pre-emergent herbicides and so on, which they probably ought not do but. The idea is there’s something that’s about to come to the surface, and it’s growing in the environment of the rest of the forest or the rest of the field. So it’s not against, it’s not over in another field, it’s not something that wants to destroy the forest; in fact, it’s going to grow because of the protection of it — the idea that there was this emergent growth that was happening in Christianity, that was protected and that was going to have the chance to survive because of the environment. We wanted to talk about what is the nature of that emergent growth of Christianity in the world: Is it healthy, is it good, does it seem that it’s going to be able to take root and to stay and what would we need to do if not? People who care for forests go around, and they find out what is the growth right down close to the ground. And, you know, most of us who don’t know anything about forests, we look at the tree tops and we think it’s a beautiful forest. But you can have a dead forest with a lot of trees in it. Our thought was how could we turn our attention, our concentration, to that which is growing? So our idea was let’s switch the conversation from being just a cultural conversation to saying what is the nature of Christianity as it’s growing from its organic roots, and what’s going to be the nature of that which is going to come? That’s how we wanted to use the language.

But emergence theory also began to be used in this conversation at the same time, and emergence theory has to do with complexity and that which is going to develop out of chaos and complexity — that what we would look at and think is just random actually starts to form patterns to it, and that’s a helpful way to think about this, too, that there seems to be this chaos that’s happening, but if you were to study it long enough you begin to see the patterns. People studied ants and they’ve studied wave theory and they’ve studied light. How it is that things that seem to be moving without any pattern to them actually do have a pattern? They do function according to a set of principles and to a set of rules. That’s not a bad way to talk about it as well.

But the hope was to try to be as generative and as creative with the language as we possibly could. We tried to come up with a phrase, and it’s caught on a bit and may have outlasted its usefulness already.

Are you surprised by the extent to which this conversation has seemed to resonate in so many quarters?

I don’t think I’m too surprised about the spread of interest and the amount of resonance that there is in this. I don’t think I’m concerned or too surprised about that, because this is the time for the larger Christian community to be interested in these ideas. Many of the conversations that people are having today about how church functions, about the nature of Christianity, about theology, about the role of humanity, about our engagement in caring for the earth and our engagement of people who live in other cultures — these are conversations that have been going on for more than a hundred years in North America at least, and in Europe for at least that long and maybe longer. It has just now hit the point of being more popular in that the language has been refined, and people have been thinking in deep and often complicated theological terms. They’ve been having this conversation for some time until people who can put that same conversation into a more common parlance have come on the scene, and so I’m not too surprised that this is the time when it has sort of caught the imagination of numbers of people. It’s not something that really started in the last 5 or 10 years. The really public side of this has caught the attention in the last 5 or 10 years, but it has really been a conversation that’s been going on since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and some of the things that happened in the late 1800s and really the development of most American cities in the last hundred years have included many of these same pieces of conversation: Who are we, how do we live together, what’s the nature of God with us, and what’s the role of the church in that? Those are the deeply considered ideas.

The reconsideration of this isn’t surprising to me, especially when you put in the generational component with the marketing component, and there are plenty of people now who want to market particular ideas to generations, so there are far more people who are interested in taking religion as a marketable tool and making that accessible to a larger group of people. When you’ve combined deep, century-long theological and sociological thought with people who are articulate, who are actually creative themselves, are freed up to do that, and you put that together again with marketing, you end up with something that spreads at a pace that seems to be unexplainable. But I don’t know it’s all that unexplainable; I just think it’s a feature of where that is right now.

How diverse are the churches that use the title “emergent”? Is it just style that is different, or are there some real theological differences?

Because there’s no gatekeeper to the emergent conversation or to using that language for someone to describe themselves or their community, there’s just no way to say what the real spread is; we don’t have any way to know that. But there clearly are some people who are thinking more methodologically: What do we do and how do we do it and how would that matter? There are some who are thinking more philosophically and theologically, and there are some who are even considering what the message of Christianity is, so a number have been saying for quite some time [that] it’s really all three of those; they work together. A deeply held theological understanding is going to produce a certain way of functioning and is going to produce a certain kind of message that we’re communicating. There’s been a lot of work done with Christians who have thought that the problem is that the church has the wrong methodology. That could be the problem, but it may run deeper than that. It might be the wrong message that’s being communicated; there might be some more deeply held presuppositions that have to be altered. Within the emergent conversation, people will run into folks who are just beginning and are right there theologically but haven’t rethought their methodology; some have begun with the methodology and that will later transform the way that they think about God and the way that they think about people and Jesus and sin and redemption. So because of the way they work together, the theology and the method and the practice that we’re communicating, there’s a symbiotic effect of those, and so to change one really will change them all. There’s some who’ll become a little frustrated that people don’t do it in the same order. I tend to be a little more forgiving on that; I tend to think that change is a very difficult thing and to try to rethink church and life and Christianity in the midst of all that we all have going on — that’s just a lot of effort and a lot of work, and any place that someone can begin, that seems to me a good place for someone to begin if they feel like they need to be deeply reconsidering what they’re about and reimagining what their faith would mean to them or to their community.

I think that ultimately there will be change methodologically and theologically. But some might begin with the method and others might begin with the theology, and those two might find the other to be a little less attractive than they would see themselves, but I think they both count. If people are seriously considering either of those, it’s going to lead them to the other. It’ll lead them from theology to methodology or from methodology to theology.

When you use phrases like “rethinking Christianity” or “rethinking the Christian message,” or when you say you are not so concerned about getting things right, a lot of evangelicals and a lot of Christians overall are threatened by that. What exactly are you calling for?

I understand that when someone hears people talking about rethinking Christianity or saying that we’re more concerned about being good and beautiful than being right, that can unnerve someone, and it can make them think that you’re going to lose the essence of Christianity. We’re not talking about doing anything beyond what the church has always done, and that is to continually understand what God’s activity in the world has been and what God’s activity in the world continues to be. Christianity is just simply not a stagnant belief. I know that that comes as a very hard concept for some people to put their minds around or for people to accept. But Christianity has never been stagnant and has never been about uniformity. It has been about unity within distinctiveness. Christians are called to Christian unity but not uniformity, and to be right is a contextual reality. We certainly should be right in our contexts. But let’s say that the Christians of the third century had felt that there was no need to reconsider what it meant to understand how Jesus was fully God and fully man for their language of the day. They were trying to take the first-century terms of what does it mean for the fullness of God to have dwelled in Christ Jesus, and they had to articulate that in a way that made sense for their day. And so the Trinity became a more unified belief and a statement of Christian doctrine. It didn’t exist in that same context before, but they were right to do so, and they put it in a way that made sense in their day.

To assume that Christianity has been this little pearl that is just covered by culture, and that all we need to do is pull away the culture and we’ll find the pearl on the inside is not a historically accurate or theologically accurate way to understand Christianity. I like to think of it much more as an onion — that an onion is made up of a series of layers, and there is no core to it; that you pull away all the layers and you get to the core. It becomes a series of layer upon layer upon layer. That’s not a bad thing; that’s a really wonderful thing — that all throughout culture and all throughout history God has been engaged in cultures where Christianity has been spread, and then Christianity has become that expression of the life of God inside that culture. So often Christianity does not bring the story of God to people; it rearticulates the story of God that is already functioning in culture and puts it into a broader Christian context. It’s simply the call of Christianity, in my view, to rethink and reimagine the very understanding and essence of what Christianity is. Never thinking that we have to begin from a dead stop or that we look at our past and we walk away from it; you never could. It’s just simply not something one should do or could do. We’re always living in a cultural context, and we’re always living in a historical context. In the emerging conversation you’ll hear a lot of people talk about what we mean by community is global, what’s happening around the world, that this isn’t just a North American thing, that it’s historical, the faith that has come before us. But it is also local, where we are, and it’s even the future; there’s a future element to all of this. The future of Christianity is important to us because we are living the past that other people are going to reflect upon. We live as these people caring about the future, caring about the past, caring about the world and caring about our current setting. There’s just no way to understand Christianity in my view without saying that we have to continually be reconsidering, reimagining, and rethinking what it means to be a Christian inside that broad context.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2005/07/08/july-8-2005-doug-pagitt-extended-interview/11764/feed/0 Scot McKnight Extended Interviewhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2005/07/08/july-8-2005-scot-mcknight-extended-interview/11762/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2005/07/08/july-8-2005-scot-mcknight-extended-interview/11762/#disqus_threadFri, 08 Jul 2005 18:27:23 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=11762Read more of Kim Lawton’s interview about the emergent church with Scot McKnight, religious studies professor at North Park University in Chicago. More →

]]>Read more of Kim Lawton’s interview about the emergent church with Scot McKnight, religious studies professor at North Park University in Chicago:

How would you describe the emergent church?

It’s a conversation among 20- and 30-year-olds about the direction of the evangelical and post-evangelical church in the next generation. That will focus on local communities and embodiment or performance of the gospel by everybody involved. It’s a reaction or a protest at certain levels against traditional evangelical churches.

What precipitated this conversation?

I think dissatisfaction with traditional evangelical answers to questions that are emerging at universities and [in] the younger culture. I often tell our people that this generation did not grow up with Mr. Green Jeans, they grew up with Mr. Rogers and Sesame Street and the emphasis upon diversity and pluralism and dialogue and conversation, rather than taking hard lines and making firm judgments about people and groups.

So how does that play out in religion and church?

There’s a general recognition, I think, among emergent voices that there should be a conversation among all Christians about what unites Christians, rather than drawing firm lines, denominational distinctives, and emphasizing differences. It’s a post-Catholic form of Catholicism, where they want to be universal and global, but they want to be global and universal at a level of community and practice rather than trying to get into long discussions and debates about theology.

Is this something new and radical, or does this kind of rethinking happen in every generation?

When I first heard about the emergent movement, the emergent conversation — these are profound categories that are being used — it reminded me of the Jesus people of the ’60s and ’70s. But the Jesus people were concerned with a post-Vietnam or a Vietnam phenomenon and were reacting to what was going on in American culture, and I think the emergent conversation is a reaction against a Christian culture rather than simply a social response. So it reminded me of that and no, I don’t think it happens in every generation, but every now and then it does happen, and this has taken hold globally, so it’s not simply a North American-United States-Canadian issue. This is a global response to how Christianity should be performed in our world.

How far are the edges being pushed?

Some traditional evangelicals have responded vehemently and almost with volatility to the emergent movement, because they see a blurring of theological lines that were earned and worked for very hard in the previous couple of generations. Evangelicals fought hard for their own distinctives over and against mainline generations. This emergent conversation wants to knock down those boundaries and engage in conversation across old-fashioned theological walls. I do think there is something very significant at this level of conversation.

And this is threatening to some wings of the church?

It threatens the more conservative evangelical group in many ways but mostly just over theological affirmations and doctrines.

In what way?

They want to open up questions. They’re asking questions about how we should understand our relationship to scripture: Is it inerrant? Is it true? And many of the emergent people are saying that it is the senior partner in the conversation, which is a healthy category. They’re asking questions about what we should believe about the afterlife. They want to ask questions about heaven and hell. They want to challenge some of the traditional Christian views on these questions. They’re very big on how to “do” church, which is not an expression that I prefer, but they are big on how the church should operate as a community of faith.

The emergent voices want to ask whole new sets of questions, answer these questions in new ways and work out church in this generation. And the final [question] and perhaps the most explosive one has been: How certain can we be about what we know? Many of these emergent voices are less certain of their theological ideas, and this appeals to a generation that is given to dialogue and to discussion and to conversation, and not making firm judgments about people.

Why is that so controversial in some parts of the church?

In the conservative evangelical wing, scripture forms the foundation for truth, and insofar as we know what scripture says, we know the truth. This has been challenged by the emergent conversation because they are saying that what we know is what we think we know, rather than what is to be known. There is a recognition that we as subjects, as knowers, influence what we think we know. Involved in this also is the belief that truth is a relationship and a life or a performance of the gospel. It is action. Truth has moved out of the realm of just what we know to who we are and how we exist as a community.

How have some conservatives reacted to that?

Several of the major conservative evangelical leaders have contended that the emergent leaders have denied the possibility of knowing truth. When significant leaders make strong pronouncements that this is dangerous or it borders on heresy, there are many people who will listen to that voice. There is a general concern about how viable, how reliable and how firm the emergent conversation really is.

How widespread and influential is the emergent church movement?

The instincts of our current generation of teenagers, 20s and 30s are in line with the instincts of the emergent conversation: dialogue, conversation, debate, respect one another, tolerance, diversity. These are the instincts of the emerging conversation.

How diverse is it? Why is it so difficult to define?

The emergent conversation is difficult to categorize because it is focused on local expressions of the gospel tied to local culture. Depending on the environment, the neighborhood, the specific culture in which an emergent conversation begins will completely shape how that local expression of the gospel works out. So it can’t be simply defined; it can’t be simply categorized, and it’s causing no end of frustration for people who would like to have tidier boxes. This is the way they want it, because they believe the gospel should have a local expression. It should be extremely different in different places because cultures are different in different places.

Emergent conversation is going to vary in different ways to the degree that a local group of people decides to embody it all. Some of them are radically emergent, some of them are moderately emergent, and some of them are just — there’s a whiff of emergence in what they have to do. It reminds me in many ways of how the seeker movement began to impact churches.

Talk a little about the categories they use. They call themselves post-modern, post-conservative, post-liberal, post-evangelical.

It’s a recognition of the postmodern context of our world. Theologically, they are not evangelical or anti-evangelical or moderate evangelical. They believe that evangelicalism and mainline denominations and even Roman Catholic churches, even Orthodox churches, are an expression of a modernist impulse. As we move beyond or become postmodern, we will also become post-evangelical, post-mainline because those distinctions were based largely on theological differences rather than practical performances. And in the postmodern church, they are concerned with performance-based faith. It’s all about mission, how we live out the gospel in our world. This will allow churches and Christians to unite.

Most of the emergent churches are post-evangelical rather than post-mainline. Evangelical churches defined themselves theologically largely, and they did so with doctrinal distinctions that sealed them off from mainline denominations, that distinguished them from mainline denominations. The emergent church is concerned with knocking down those boundaries, so it becomes post-evangelical in the sense that “that’s the way we used to do things.” We no longer do things that way now. We have more of a conversation and a dialogue than a robust debate where we draw lines and divide ourselves off from one another.

What are some of the big challenges that face this movement?

The biggest challenges that the emergent conversation is facing is whether it will be truly evangelistic and reach out or whether it will be, at times too often, disaffected evangelicals getting together to be disaffected; whether it will be genuinely global, whether it will be genuinely diverse, attracting people who are not just of one ethnicity or one intellectual level or one economic makeup but one that will minister to an entire neighborhood in all different kinds of contexts.

I think that one of the major issues for the church is going to be whether the emergent conversation becomes genuinely theologically coherent. Right now, a lot of people have trouble figuring out what this is all about, and until that answer comes — what is it all about? — there will be people who will simply not write their name on the line. The church has always defined itself on the basis of some of its theological commitments — its creeds and in Protestantism, what took place in the Reformation. Until this emergent conversation does draw a few lines in the sand so people know where they are, there will be challenges.

The emergent conversation is being challenged by traditional Christian groups to articulate its theology. What do you believe is a question being asked, and until the emergent conversation and its leaders articulate its theology at some level — this is what we believe, this is what we don’t believe — then the church will not take notice to the degree that it perhaps should, because the church always has articulated its theology. We expect a local church to say what it believes and what it doesn’t believe, and it will have to define itself in its own way. We’re not asking for every emergent church to have a 55-point theological set of affirmations, but instead to affirm what you believe about theological ideas.

They like to say it’s not about finding answers, it’s about asking questions. But is there a point at which a faith group needs to offer some answers? Do questions alone sustain spirituality?

This is a good question, and it’s an important question for emergent leaders to consider. The emergent conversation and its leaders recognize that the church has traditionally defined itself by creeds. They are worried about how many lines of creeds we have to affirm because they believe that genuine Christian spirituality is action and life and community and performance and embodiment rather than simply the affirmation of certain doctrines. I understand that many of them want to ask good questions, but for things to be Christian, to hold scripture as the senior voice in a conversation means that there are answers and there are limits to what those answers can be.

Is the push for institutionalization also a big challenge for folks who don’t even like to call themselves a movement?

There are so many people now interested in the emergent conversation that it will not be possible to stop some levels of institutionalization. We know how groups and churches develop. They begin informal; they begin at the level of community and relationships and friendships. It’s small. People know one another, they know they’re ideas, they trust one another. But as a group grows it has to institutionalize, develop lines of authority, lines of leadership, and when they don’t develop that, they generally fall apart. Right now the emergent conversation has found itself so big so fast that there has to be some institutionalizing process going on. But I hope they keep some of the informality, because it allows freedom and growth and new ideas to take place.

How influential has Brian McLaren been in all of this?

What I like most about Brian McLaren is he’s asking hard questions and he’s not letting people get by with shallow answers. He’s forcing conversation about topics that are sacred cows in the evangelical church.

How controversial within the evangelical world is it for Brian McLaren to be raising questions about hell and the afterlife?

Most evangelical Christians have a view of hell that came out of Dante’s Divine Comedy and out of categories and images that they heard from pastors and preachers. Brian McLaren has [asked], what was the rhetorical function of this literature in the Bible and is it really describing the afterlife? Can we imagine fire or should we imagine that this is rhetorical language about separation or pain or a less than noble state in the presence of God? Brian is asking a very difficult question. He’s challenging evangelicals to look at their Bible again, to see what it really does say and how much of it is myth and how much of it is straightforward description of the afterlife. It’s a good question to ask.

And how provocative is it for him to be asking it?

It’s so provocative because it challenges the foundation for many people and the reason for preaching the gospel, because it’s about eternity. McLaren is saying the focus of Jesus, the focus of the Bible is on life in the world as we live it here and now rather than heaven, whereas the evangelical gospel has very often been, “Jesus came to earth to die for my sins so I can go to heaven.” The rest of the world really doesn’t matter that much. And McLaren is saying no, that’s not what Jesus taught. He’s trying to get people into a conversation about a powerful subject that lies at the heart of what many people think the gospel is about. I think he has been a masterful success at getting a conversation going, and I think this is a conversation worth having.

How important has the Web and blogging been to this conversation?

The emergent conversation is essentially a theological conversation. Theological conversations in the past have taken place in books and magazines and articles. The emergent conversation is taking place in books, in conferences, but especially on blogs and Web sites. You can’t become conversant with the emergent conversation until you get on the Web sites and start reading the blogs. Tall Skinny Kiwi, Theoblogy — these are important blogs that people go to to find out what’s being said and what the conversation is going on now. I had a conversation with an emergent-type pastor the other day who told me he subscribes to 250 blog sites. I didn’t know there were that many. This is not a conversation that is taking place in a traditional way. If you think you can go to the bookstore and check out the most recent book and find out what’s going on, you’ll miss 90 percent of the conversation, which is essentially a grassroots, democratic, electronic and interpersonal conversation in local churches.

Is this conversation all that different from past movements within Christianity?

The emergent conversation operates more in theology than in the past. In the past, the evangelical conversation and theology take place by believing in the total doctrine of scripture so that all of scripture must be mined to find out what we are to believe. The emergent conversation says we begin with Jesus, and everything else is secondary to what Jesus says in his vision for the kingdom. And it’s not just what Jesus says, it’s the community around Jesus, it’s the practices of Jesus, it’s the relationship to Jesus that gives rise to all other theological reflections. They’re trying to figure out how to live the gospel in our culture today, as other Christians have always tried to work out the gospel in their generation. But they are so self-conscious about the culture and how to relate to that culture that there’s a sharper knife and a deeper perception than some generations that simply absorbed the culture in previous eras.

]]>Read more of Kim Lawton’s interview with Trinity Evangelical Divinity School professor D.A. Carson, author of BECOMING CONVERSANT WITH THE EMERGING CHURCH (Zondervan):

What are your main concerns about the emerging church movement?

The movement is enormously diverse, and I really don’t want to come across as just panning it. Part of it is concerned with reaching people who are often disenfranchised from what the Bible says or from Christians, and for this sort of concern the emerging people should only be praised, in my view. On the other hand, some are so eager to make adaptations to fit what is understood to be the postmodern mind, or the sensibilities of the so-called “Y Generation,” sort of under 25, under-30-year-olds, that parts of what the Bible actually says get shifted to the side. And so what comes across is not, sometimes, the historic Gospel that you actually find in the Bible. If you start losing the good news about Jesus, then the price is pretty high.

Could you give examples of that?

Well, for example, the historic good news of the Gospel right across the centuries has always been concerned not only with excellent relationships and who God is and turning from that which is evil, but it has also been concerned to confess certain things as true. And the opposite of these things, then, is not true. But some in the emerging movement so influenced by postmodern sensibilities find any mention of truth, objective truth, angular or offensive. It might sound intolerant, and so people like to talk about Jesus himself as the truth, so the truth is relational. Well, I want to talk about Jesus as the truth, too. But the same Gospel, the Gospel of John that portrays Jesus as the truth — the truth made flesh, as it were — also insists that certain things are true, and without them the whole good news about Jesus and what he’s done and why he came and how he actually transformed us gets lost somewhere in the shuffle. So, the Gospel itself is angular. It always has been. It always conflicts. It always challenges every generation. It challenges different generations in different ways. But it can never be — it should never be simply domesticated to the current sensibilities.

In your book you outline concerns about how some in the movement handle the notion of “truth.” What are your concerns when some say, “We’re limited human beings, so we may not have the right understandings of truth”? Are there some things we can be certain of?

It is important to say that we can never have the knowledge of God, what might be called an omniscient access to truth — that is the access to truth only a mind that knows everything can actually have. Postmodern sensibilities have, in fact, helped to remind us that we can only know things as finite human beings can know things. But if you set the bar for the possibility of talking about knowledge at the level of omniscience, of actually being able to know something perfectly and absolutely, the bar is just set too high — it’s unrealistic. I’d want to say that human beings can know things not with the certainty that belongs only to God, but with all kinds of degrees of certainty on which you base your life — the kinds of knowledge that are appropriate to human beings. Paul goes so far, for example, when he’s talking about the resurrection of Jesus, as to say, “If you believe that Jesus rose from the dead” when, in fact, he didn’t rise from the dead, under the assumption now that it was made up or something, “then your faith, far from being commendable, is useless, it’s vain. In fact, he goes so far as to say, “You are of all people most to be pitied if you are believing something, no matter how sincerely, that isn’t true.” In the Bible, genuine faith is increased and multiplied by the articulation in defense of truth. If instead you try to make faith merely a sort of existential leap — a kind of “I want to join this community because the benefits seem to me to be good. I will confess the kinds of things this group confesses, without any claim about whether this sort of thing is true,” one is leaving an awful lot of the New Testament behind. The price is simply too high to pay.

In your book you are also very critical of some of the theological discussions going on within the emergent church movement. What troubles you?

A very significant percentage, probably the majority of the leaders of this emerging movement — they prefer to call it the emerging conversation rather than the movement — are folk who come from a culturally pretty conservative background, most of whom have not had much significant biblical or theological training, but who have been part, in the words of [Brian] McLaren — it’s a lovely expression — on the most conservative twig, on the most conservative branch of the evangelical tree. And then they found this cultural location so narrow or so disassociated from the culture, so removed from where things are happening in our world that eventually they jumped off. They sort of jumped onto a vine and swung to another part of the tree. There’s been a pendulum swing away from things. Instead of finding how to reshape things in the light of what the Bible actually says, using the Bible as the norm, the thing that actually establishes how we should live and how we should think and what we should teach, how we should interact with each other, there has been a kind of pendulum swing to another part, away from this conservative cultural isolationism to something else.

Now I want to say that thoughtful Christians should, by all means, try to read the culture; in this regard I am thankful for the concerns of the emerging church. But it would be really good if they did a little more serious Bible study, got a little better training and aimed to be in the center of historic confessionalism rather than merely taking what is, sometimes from my perspective, a bit of a pendulum swing.

Do you feel they are not within traditional, historical Christianity? They say every generation must figure out what it is to be a Christian in their particular time.

The movement is so large that I don’t want to answer that with a simple yes or no. Many, many in the movement are certainly in the stream of confessing Christianity but are merely adding a few candles or a bit of liturgy or reshaping how they do corporate worship or having more discussion or whatever and call it “emerging.” … Most insist that the Bible really does think of the devil as being a personal individual. But on the other hand, some within this movement disavow that entirely. Although it is true in one sense that every generation has to work things out from the Bible for itself — I don’t want to deny that; you shouldn’t merely accept formulas from the previous generation — at the same time you learn from other generations, too. It’s not as if all wisdom begins and ends with us. That is leaning too hard on a kind of postmodern subjectivism so that nothing can ever be overturned or refuted or corrected. Whereas even in the New Testament documents themselves there was false teaching that was perceived to be false and condemned as false, even within the first century. In other words, the appeal to work something out afresh, to think it through must be made with a kind of humility of mind that listens very carefully not only to the biblical texts themselves but also listens to what Christians have understood across the centuries and does not too easily leap to the present generation, as if its own accounting of these things [is] a certain kind of independent norm.

What cautions do you have for the emerging church movement as it develops?

One of the things I like about them is their emphasis on being authentic. I think that’s wise. But the authenticity is so often tied, as far as I can see, to their passion for the emerging movement. It seems to me that Christians ought to be passionate, first of all, about Christ and about the Gospel, about the Good News. And then, of course, things have to be worked out in different contexts — whether you’re in an urban setting, or you’re working with old-age pensioners or a Y-Generation crowd. By all means, you’ve got to work things out in a local ministry. But what should characterize Christians is a passion for people because of the Gospel, because of Christ, because of God’s love for us in Christ. If people are passionate about that and then are working out cultural challenges — fine, I can live with that. But as soon as someone begins to assume the Gospel and become passionate about something like the emerging movement, I get a little nervous. It’s not that there are not really excellent people in the movement who really do believe the Gospel, but when you listen to what they talk about, what they write about, what they go to conferences for, it all has to do with emergent profiles and how you do this and that. It has to do with the in-house jargon of this developing movement. Some of them go as so far to say that if you’re not with them, you really are unable to minister at all to this new emerging church, this new generation coming along, which, quite frankly, is a load of piffle. There are some excellent people who are ministering all around the country outside the movement to the people that interest this movement the most.

What I want to see in the movement is less focus on emerging as a category and more focus on the Gospel, because otherwise, if the Gospel is merely the assumed thing rather than the thing about which we are passionate, in another half-generation, another generation, the Gospel itself becomes diluted, even denied. The successors and heirs of the current leaders to the movement will be passionate about the things they are passionate about, and they are being stamped now, it seems to me, by whether they are or are not sufficiently emerging, rather than being stamped by whether they are or are not sufficiently faithful to the historic Gospel.

Do you see this as a fad or as something that will really transform the church?

I think that the movement itself is likely to split. In fact, in some ways it already has. One of the figures, for example, who was instrumental in starting the movement in the early ’90s is Mark Driscoll from the Pacific Northwest. He still is extraordinarily fruitful today in multiplying churches and reaching out to people who are not normally touched by other churches. Hats off to him.

Another segment will continue, more or less, doing what it is now doing — that is, using the “emerging” label as the banner flag around which various people coalesce. And others could easily hive off, and, quite frankly, become cultic and dislocated from historic confessionalism at all.

What is your assessment of the role scripture seems to be playing in emergent theology and spirituality?

Many in the movement use scripture in one fashion or another. But I have yet to see any serious work from this camp, studying scripture closely, thinking of scripture carefully. It tends to be a kind of proof-texting, pick-a-text-to-prove-a-point sort of approach rather than really getting inside a biblical book or a chunk of scripture and thinking it out and bowing before it. In other words, scripture really must have a reforming power in our lives. It’s got to say where we’re wrong as well as encourage us where we’re wounded and forgive us where we are repentant sinners, and so forth. The scripture has a lot of different effects. But one of the effects it must have is to correct us. What I do not hear from this camp is the kind of serious wrestling with scripture that will enable scripture to contradict not only modernism but [also] postmodernism. In other words, most in this camp are so concerned about the evils of modernism that they cannot see any dangers at all in postmodern trends in the culture. Or there are very slim and slender dangers that are admitted by way of concession.

In your book, you call some emergent thinking “theologically shallow” and “intellectually incoherent.” Why do you think that?

Let me give an example. Two or three or the authors in the movement, for example, when they come to try to understand afresh what Christ accomplished on the cross, proceed by listing some of the ways that Christ’s cross work has been understood in the past. For example, some have understood what’s called the “Christus Victor” theme, that is, Christ overcomes; he’s the victor over sin and death and so forth. Another is that he is in some ways our representative. Another is that he provides a model for absorbing the guilt and penalty. It becomes the model for the way he should live. And still another is that he is our substitute. He bears our death. He bears our penalty. He takes our place and we are permitted to go free. That’s why God has accepted us, because Christ has died in our behalf. Now the way this is regularly set out is something like this: Here we are in the history of the church with these various models. They each have strengths or weaknesses. Pick one. Pick two, if you like, and see how they fit in to where you are in your life and live it. Well, I want to argue that is usually a bad use of history … That simply isn’t biblically informed. It’s not being informed by scripture. It’s got a shallow approach to the history of doctrine, in the sense that it’s a theologically shallow pick-and-choose sort of approach rather than trying to bring everything so far as we possibly can for the test of scripture.

One of the hallmarks of the movement is that it doesn’t want to have preachers from a pulpit or a professor’s desk telling Christians what to believe. Shouldn’t Christians wrestle for themselves with a lot of these issues?

Sometimes the problem is the way it is set up, as it were. No one believes more strongly than I do that every Christian should be a theologian. In that sense we all need to work it out. I want all Christians who can read, to read their Bibles and to read beyond the Bible — to read the history and theology. By all means read, read, read and, in that sense, interact. I don’t want a kind of priestly class of scholars or pastors or theologians who somehow give dictates to the church about what must be believed. One of the great emphases, in fact, of the Reformation is the so-called universal priesthood of all believers. I certainly don’t want to give any impression that I have some sort of inside access to God that others don’t have or can’t have in principle. On the other hand, clearly some people know more than others or live longer, study Scripture more, or the like. After all, that is what these leaders of the movement must think, the way they keep writing books and telling the rest of us what we should be believing about the relationship between the Bible and movement. There are degrees of seniority and experience. What is passed on should not be in a sort of dictate fashion and “You believe this because I said so. You obey me because I’m up and you’re down.” On the other hand, there are many, many ordinary pastors and teachers of scripture who convey something of the truth of scripture with enormous personal warmth and humility of mind even while themselves conveying something of the authority of scripture itself. This is God’s self-disclosure in words. God is a talking God, and thus you must come to wrestle with him. You must wrestle with what he said. And insofar as pastors or preachers or teachers are seen actually to be faithfully representing what is given, then eventually people are not arguing with some authority figure. They are arguing with scripture itself. Of course, I want Christians to wrestle like that. On the other hand, precisely because not everybody is as mature, as informed, as well read as others, this does not mean that every opinion has equal weight in terms of the kind of influence it should have in the church.

There needs to be a place in the church or just outside — there needs to be a place where people feel free to ask questions without being put upon, where they feel free to ask difficult, challenging questions to voice their skepticism. All of that’s necessary; I couldn’t agree more. On the other hand, there also needs to be a place where more senior Christians are teaching more junior Christians. Come see for yourself. Read, read. Find out these things for yourself. Grow, grow. There is some material here to learn and not simply give your opinion about.

Are young people today looking for a place to ask spiritual questions or to find answers?

There’s often a sort of stereotype to the Y-Generation or postmodern people that they can’t stand any authority. In fact, it’s even arguable that there’s even a swing back in university student profiles and elsewhere — there’s a kind of suspicion of people who are so endlessly open that they can never articulate anything. In fact, I’m neither a prophet nor a son of a prophet, but it wouldn’t surprise me if there were a kind of a cultural swing to the right on some of these issues in the next 20 years. But whether that’s the case or not, there is always a segment of the population, even in very fluctuating times, that because the times are fluctuating want a little more stability and structure and order. … Ultimately, if you try to weigh and evaluate and think without having the grist for the mill, it just becomes a pretty empty-headed discussion.

Is it possible to generalize about the emerging movement, since it is so diverse?

One of the reasons why it is difficult to evaluate the emerging church movement fairly is because of its diversity. Some people, especially if they have come from conservative backgrounds, have found themselves disenfranchised in their ability to talk with ordinary people. They’ve picked up some tips from some of the emerging leaders, and so they think of themselves now as part of the emerging movement. Basically, they’re simply ordinary Christians who have just learned a little bit better how to talk with people who aren’t Christians and who live outside their own contextual Christian culture. That’s all to the good as far I’m concerned. On the other hand, as the emerging tag becomes stronger and stronger, then sometimes they become a little more interested not in actually winning other people to Christ as [in] winning other Christians to the emerging flag. That becomes a little more troubling. And then you keep moving farther out and farther out and farther out until the whole cultural shift that is sometimes characterized by the label “postmodern” begins to domesticate what the Bible is actually about. At that point it becomes more than troubling. It becomes really a threat to historic Christianity. All of it still flies under the label “emerging,” and so you can go to a major emerging conference and all of these different voices are speaking equally. If you criticize someone for example at, oh, we’ll call it the far left end — although it’s not really a left and right sort of thing — at the more skeptical end of things, at the postmodern end of things, at the more open-ended end of things, you criticize someone along those lines and say, you know, I’m a little worried about just where this is taking us, there’ll be a whole lot of people at the other end of the spectrum saying, don’t put me in that basket. I’m as strong a believer in what Christ has done for us as you are.

But nevertheless, for both groups, the emerging flag becomes a little more important than the Gospel itself, and that eventually begins to trouble me.

You’ve said some wings of the emerging church are posing a threat to traditional Christianity. Is that really the case, or is it overstating the case?

Christianity itself is far more stable than something that can be shoved over by a movement. Christ himself said, “I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.” God is not going to be threatened by any movement in this century or any other century. The church in that sense has withstood wars and persecution and attacks and its own seductions and stupidities. It’s not going to be overturned by a movement, so I don’t want to say that. All I’m saying is that those who get sucked into the far-out end so that accommodation to postmodern sensitivities, a refusal to deal with the category of truth, a refusal to say that, according to the teachings of Jesus, some things are right and some things are wrong, that there is an objective truth, propositional truth to be announced as well as discipleship to Christ to be lived and displayed, and authenticity is delight in God to be demonstrated individually and corporately, in addition to all of these things there is truth to be announced — if you start losing that, you really step outside what Christianity is. The Gospel is something to be taught and to be believed. It is not something simply to be experienced.

One of the troubling features of the movement is that it is investing so much energy and self-identity in the movement itself and merely assuming the Gospel, rather than investing this passionate energy in the Gospel and in the application of the Gospel to people using genuine cultural insight to learn better how to do it. As soon as the Gospel becomes something that is merely assumed, while the movement becomes its own raison d’etre, its own reason for being, then it is approaching silliness. It is certainly losing the story. A wheel is coming off somewhere.

What’s your impression as you read Brian McLaren’s writings and what he is calling for?

Well, first of all, I want to say that he’s a charmer. He writes well. He writes engagingly. I’ve never had the privilege of meeting him. But I’m sure I would enjoy sitting down and having a drink with him and long conversation. He’s clearly warm-hearted and winsome. So, if I disagree with him on some point or other, I want to say in the strongest terms that he is, as least as I’ve seen him, above being a nasty or a petty or the like, and for all of these reasons I appreciate him. Moreover, some of the questions he raises have to be raised again and again every generation. I’m far from saying that there’s nothing beautiful or interesting or challenging in the book [A GENEROUS ORTHODOXY]. On the other hand, his very niceness can sometimes entice people to come along with the niceness, even if he’s saying something that is not, at the end of the day, really sensible.

What are some of the points that concern you?

Consider his book A GENEROUS ORTHODOXY. The subtitle is impossible to repeat. It’s something like probably 20 or 30 more words [“Why I am a missonal evangelical post/protestant liberal/conservative mystical/poetic biblical charismatic/contemplative fundamentalist/Calvinist Anabaptist/Anglican Methodist Catholic green incarnational depressed-yet-hopeful emergent unfinished Christian”] and in one sense that really fits the postmodern mood, doesn’t it? A pick-and-choose bit that takes a bit from here and a bit from there and refuses to be tied down to any tradition. There’s something really attractive about that in the contemporary culture. But when you actually look at the arguments he makes for why he belongs to this or that camp, sooner or later one becomes — I don’t know how to say it but — gently appalled at the lack of rigor, even the way serious discussions are skated over.

For example, “Why I am an evangelical”: The reason he says he’s evangelical is because he likes evangelical passion. Now notice, he likes evangelical passion, not evangelical Gospel or their historic commitment to good works and service or their relationship to the great doctrines articulated in the Reformation or their worldwide evangelism. It’s the passion. There is nothing distinctive about passion and evangelicalism. Many movements are passionate. The fact that a movement is passionate does not make it evangelical. So for him to say that he is evangelical because he is passionate is simply a non sequitor.

Similarly, when he says that he is Reformed he takes one slogan from the whole Reformation heritage: Semper Reformandum, that is to say, the Reformers thought that the church should always be reforming itself in light of the word of God, and he says in that sense he, too, is Reformed. Well, yes, yes, just about every group wants to be reforming itself in the light of scripture. … The only element that he identifies himself with in the Reformation, to call himself reformed, is he’s always reforming himself. I find this sort of argumentation to be either be cute and clever or, frankly, right on the edge of dishonest. If you claim to be something, you ought to be identifiable as such by at least some others in the party. I don’t know anybody in the Reformed tradition that would think of McLaren as being Reformed. In fact, it’s hard to imagine his definition of being passionate as adequate for being identified as an evangelical in the evangelical tradition, too — the same also with his definition of liberalism and Catholicism and so on. It becomes a slippery way of picking and choosing rather than a way of being, somehow, the kind of person who can put all of these traditions together. At the end of the day, it becomes a very isolated new form of individualism, in which I pick what I want from these things rather than, in fact, belonging honestly to any of them. Instead of being all of these things, he really isn’t any of them but is really becoming his own new identity by picking and choosing among them. That sort of self-focus and self-definition — it’s really right on the very edge of a new form of self-idolatry, isn’t it?

Is part of your problem that it’s hard to tell exactly where he comes down?

It’s not because he doesn’t want to give any answer at all, it’s because he wants to give answers that are fuzzy. That is his intent. It’s not because he is a clever diplomat who is trying to avoid the toughest questions by using ambiguous answers of a diplomatic cast, but everybody who understands the language knows what he really means. He really does want all of these edges taken away. He wants to avoid what he perceives to be the angularity of confessional truth. And he’s very good at dancing around. He’s very good at it. At the end of the day, it seems to me that it avoids some of the angularities of the Bible itself.

He raises the topic of hell and criticizes traditional evangelicals for putting so much emphasis on “personal” salvation. How provocative is this kind of language?

On the personal faith sort of thing, there are segments of the broad evangelical movement where, quite frankly, I share his concerns. It’s often been pointed out — this is really coming to it from the side, but — it has also been pointed out in recent times that when you take out the morals profile of the evangelical movement as a whole — let’s say, divorce rates — that profile, those rates are indifferentiable from the rates of the culture at large, and that can be very troubling. But as soon as you start putting in some filters, as soon as you start saying so-called evangelicals who go to church at least once a week, and who read their Bibles regularly, and who really do confess Jesus as Lord meaningfully, and who want to live under the authority of the Bible, then the morals profiles of that group of evangelicals is hugely different from the profile of the culture at large and of evangelicals self-proclaimed at large. In other words, I would say that the so-called evangelical movement today is so broad that there are all kinds of people who sort of “get done”; they’ve made a personal statement of faith and think that they’re in and they signed a card or they walked an aisle, but [they] really haven’t, in any biblical terms, been regenerate. They really haven’t come to know God. Their lives really haven’t been transformed by the Gospel. Whereas the Bible is very clear that the genuine faith does transform you. It really does change you. Now, if that’s what he’s saying, I’m with him. I’m with him one hundred percent. On the other hand, it’s a bit of a caricature to say that all of evangelicalism is like that. There are some big swathes of it that are, in my view, a long way away from the Bible itself. The Bible must be the reforming agent. But there are also huge swathes of evangelicalism which stress not only that individuals must individually repent and believe but that they join together as brothers and sisters in Christ who constitute a local church, in part of the people of God adjoining men and women from every town and tribe and people and nation. I believe that as passionately as anyone. And many of us do. Yet at the same time, while you’re stressing this corporateness, you still want to say that people have to trust individually. That too is something that is demanded again and again and again in Scripture.

Do people walk away and say, “Brian McLaren does not believe in hell”?

It is worth reminding ourselves that the person who speaks most often about hell in all the Bible is Jesus. I know that there are very clever attempts to domesticate what he says, but it really is hard to avoid the angularity of his insistence that there is a heaven to be gained and a hell to be feared. Now that does not mean that Christianity is only for the life to come and is not for this life. That’s simply isn’t the case. And it does not mean either that most Christian preachers of the traditional camp spend all of their time warning against hell. In fact, in my judgment, broader evangelicalism today is so diluted on what Jesus himself actually says about hell that there aren’t many serious warnings at all, even from within the traditional camp. The day when people were so heavenly-minded there was no earthly good — if it ever existed, certainly it isn’t today. Nowadays we’re so earthly-minded that we’re probably good for neither heaven nor hell.

There’s such a focus on the [contemporary] dimensions of Christianity that the eternal dimensions of being ready to meet your Maker can get lost in the shuffle somehow, but those dimensions are taught by Jesus himself. … And so it is important to capture that dimension or you lose something that is integral to the teaching of Jesus himself.

How provocative is it for McLaren to raise these questions and make suggestions that challenge traditional understandings?

If the suggestions he were making were based on careful, close reading of scripture, and [if he] interacted with people who, similarly, have made close readings of scripture, then it would be simply part of the broader discussion. But, in fact, if he takes people farther and farther away by clever arguments that are not submitting to scripture, then I fear that what will happen [over] the long haul is that he will be disenfranchised. He will disenfranchise himself. In some ways, his theology reminds me very much of a sort of old-fashioned 1920s liberalism, and eventually, I think, more and more people will see that, unless he himself self-corrects, which is still possible.

How should people read his writings, especially those who do not have theology degrees?

Read discerningly. Read everybody discerningly, whether you’re reading my books or his books. Test everything by Scripture. Don’t believe somebody just because they’re nice and write well, or just because they’re scratching where the current culture is itching. Always, always, always if you’re a Christian, come back to the test of scripture, so far as that is humanly possible.

Some evangelical leaders have accused him of being heretical. Is that fair?

Brian is so careful to dance around the edges that he’s shrewd enough not to come into the position where he simply says, “I know that’s what the Bible says, and I disbelieve it.” At some point, when a person does that, then categories like “heresy” are appropriate categories. But he’s so careful not to do that while skirting the same issues, giving the impression that they’re either not important or he wants to reinterpret them, that at some point I understand why those labels are being raised. But with my whole heart I would much rather see him hear these sorts of criticisms and self-correct. Come back and re-read scripture afresh and reform himself in the light of the word of God rather than simply being turfed out too soon, too quickly, as it were. He is helping some people rethink. Do I think he’s saying some dangerous things — dangerous in the sense that he’s diverting people from things that are central to the Gospel, that are nonnegotiable as part of the Gospel — he’s diverting people away from those things? Yes, in that sense, I think he’s dangerous. On the other hand, I hope and pray with all my heart that he will, as he’s made several shifts in his life already, make another one that comes back to the centrality of what the Bible actually says and be more concerned to be faithful to that than to the current postmodern agenda.

To what extent do you think these are lasting ideas or a current fad?

The staying component in what they’re doing is the missional concern to reach a new generation of biblically illiterate people who don’t know any of the theological jargon, don’t know that the Bible has two testaments, don’t know how it’s put together. The emphasis on understanding the culture, reaching out to people — all of those things are hugely important. They have a staying power. They’re part of Christian confessionalism, Christian mission, in every generation. And there are many, many, many Christians outside the movement that share exactly that perspective. In that sense, they’re not nearly as new or as innovative as they think they are. But the bits that are most distinctive in the so-called emerging church movement are, in my judgment, largely ephemeral, because they have been called forth by certain cultural developments, and as the culture changes, as cultures do change, then those things will shift again. I just can’t predict how the shifts will come about, but my guess is that in 50 years, nobody will be talking about the emerging church movement. They will still be talking about the Gospel of Christ.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2005/07/08/july-8-2005-d-a-carson-extended-interview/11760/feed/0 The Emerging Church, Part Onehttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2005/07/08/july-8-2005-the-emerging-church-part-one/11744/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/2005/07/08/july-8-2005-the-emerging-church-part-one/11744/#disqus_threadFri, 08 Jul 2005 14:02:38 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/?p=11744The emerging church movement began several years ago as a conversation among evangelical Gen-X leaders who were alarmed at church dropout rates among 20s and 30s. They formed a loose network named Emergent to discuss what it means in today’s world to follow Jesus and to reach out to others. More →

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Now, the first of a special, two-part series on a growing movement that is rethinking what Christianity and the church should look like in a contemporary culture. Some call it “the emerging church.” Some say it’s “emergent.” Whatever it’s called, it is developing among both evangelical and mainline Protestants, especially young ones. For some, it’s confusing. It’s also controversial, as Kim Lawton reports.

KIM LAWTON: In a dark sanctuary filled with votive candles, fast-paced images flash across video screens. Participants come forward to write their names on a wooden cross on the floor. At the altar, a DJ with a computer mixes the music to set the mood.

Welcome to worship for the coming generation.

More and more Christians say the usual ways of “doing church” no longer resonate in a contemporary, postmodern culture. Seeking to fill the gap, a growing movement called “the emerging church” is developing new forms of worship and theological questioning for a new cultural context.

DOUG PAGITT (Pastor, Solomon’s Porch Church): Christianity is just simply not a stagnant belief. And I know that that comes as a very hard concept for some people to put their minds around, or for people to accept. But Christianity has never been stagnant and has never been about uniformity.

LAWTON: But critics fear some parts of the movement may be heading in a dangerous direction.

DON CARSON (Professor, Trinity Evangelical Divinity School): You keep moving farther out and farther out and farther out, until the whole cultural shift that is sometimes characterized by the label “postmodern” begins to domesticate what the Bible is actually about. And at that point, it becomes more than troubling. It becomes really a threat to historic Christianity.

LAWTON: The emerging church movement began several years ago as a conversation among evangelical Gen-X leaders who were alarmed at church dropout rates among 20s and 30s. About the same time, a pastor from Maryland, Brian McLaren, began writing about what he saw as a growing disillusionment with the way evangelical Christianity was being practiced.

BRIAN MCLAREN (Pastor, Cedar Ridge Community Church): So it was [a] very exciting coming together of some of these younger leaders, and some of us a little bit older, saying, “This is our world, and this is the future. And the Christian faith and our individual churches, we’ve got to engage with and deal with it.”

LAWTON: They formed a loose network named Emergent to discuss what it means in today’s world to follow Jesus and to reach out to others. Their discussions exploded over the Internet, especially through several lengthy and ongoing blogs. The network now sponsors national conventions and offers resources, but emergent leaders still resist becoming institutionalized. Many vigorously deny that it should even be called a movement.

Call it what you want, the emerging church is having a big impact across denominational lines. But there are no easy labels. Participants have called themselves postmodern, postconservative, postliberal, postevangelical, and post-Protestant.

Professor Scot McKnight of North Park University in Chicago is closely monitoring the Emergent conversation and its participants.

SCOT MCKNIGHT (Professor, North Park University): It can’t be simply defined; it can’t be simply categorized. And it’s causing no end of frustration for people who’d like to have tidier boxes. This is the way they want it because they believe the gospel should have a local expression.

LAWTON: Solomon’s Porch is an emerging church that began six years ago in Minneapolis. Its pastor, Doug Pagitt, was one of the early Emergent leaders. The church meets in the round and has couches and recliners instead of pews.

Pastor PAGITT: When you sit on a couch as opposed to a bench or a pew or something else, you just sort of have a sense that you’re supposed to talk to that person. Because who do you sit on a couch with, other than a friend? And so, it implies a relationship.

LAWTON (To Pastor Pagitt): Why do you worship this way, in the round, as opposed to, you know, a more traditional model, which is everybody looking forward?

Pastor PAGITT: We’re trying to say something about where power lies in our community. And so to meet in the round says all of these people matter.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN (To Congregants): We gather not simply to be a blessing.

LAWTON: Every member here has a say in what happens. They don’t call it a Sunday worship service; it’s a worship gathering, and it happens on Sunday evenings. Pagitt doesn’t preach sermons, he leads discussions. No question is off limits.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: There’s a sort of comfort in knowing that one, I don’t have to have the answers, and that there aren’t necessarily answers.

LAWTON: Pagitt says their community reflects the contemporary culture.

Pastor PAGITT: We are people who tend to think we matter and our voice matters and our opinion matters, even if we’re not all that educated, even if we’re not as qualified as someone else. It doesn’t exclude that voice from the conversation.

LAWTON: Individual emerging churches may look different, but they share many characteristics. Most are casual, with a big emphasis on the experiential.

Pastor MCLAREN: It’s not just a matter of coming and sitting in a pew and enduring 50 or 70 or whatever minutes of observing something happen. But it’s saying, “I want to experience God. I’m interested in coming into an experience here.”

LAWTON: Worship is participatory and multisensory. People are encouraged to tangibly express their spirituality. Many are weaving together elements from different religious traditions, especially Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy. Some are discovering medieval mystical practices such as walking the labyrinth, but adding decidedly modern twists. It’s a pick-your-own-mix approach that also stresses community and social justice.

Pastor MCLAREN: More and more of us are feeling that if we have a version of the Christian faith that does not make us the kind of people that make this a better world, we really want no part of it.

LAWTON: There are similar practices in mainline Protestant churches, such as Cornerstone United Methodist Church in Naples, Florida. There, a blue jeans-wearing, electric guitar-playing minister leads a lively service that combines United Methodist tradition with high church liturgy and a Pentecostal flavor.

ROY TERRY (Pastor, Cornerstone United Methodist Church): I joke around in saying I’m more of a Metho-Catho-Costalite than I am a United Methodist, and I think that’s because each of those traditions has added so much to my faith experience and my growth.

DIANA BUTLER BASS (Religion Historian, Virginia Theological Seminary): These mainline churches are as dissatisfied with their bureaucratic structures and their denominational structures as these emerging evangelicals are with the traditional patterns of setting up evangelical congregations. So they’re — on both sides of this conversation, they’re reaching toward new kinds of structures.

LAWTON: And it’s more than just worship styles. Some, but not all, in the emerging church movement are urging profound theological reassessments. They advocate wrestling with traditional understandings of the faith, rather than accepting pat answers.

Pastor PAGITT: It’s more important for us to feel like we’re representing a beautiful expression of our life with God than it is to be right about everything.

Professor MCKNIGHT: Many of these emergent voices are less certain of their theological ideas, and this appeals to a generation that is given to dialogue and to discussion and to conversation, and not making firm judgments about people.

LAWTON: In some cases, McKnight says, they are challenging deeply held views.

Prof. MCKNIGHT: They’re asking questions about how we should understand our relationship to Scripture. Is it inerrant; is it true? They’re asking questions about what we should believe about the afterlife.

LAWTON: Brian McLaren has been especially provocative.

Pastor MCLAREN: When we make it sound like we have all the bolts screwed down tight and all the nails hammered in, and everything’s all boxed up and we’ve got it all figured out, at that moment, I think we have stopped being faithful.

Prof. CARSON: There is truth to be announced. If you start losing that, you really step outside what Christianity is. The gospel is something to be taught and to be believed. It is not something simply to be experienced.

LAWTON: Professor Don Carson of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Illinois is among the evangelical leaders troubled by some emergent ideas. His new book critiques the movement.

Prof. CARSON: Some in the emerging movement, so influenced by postmodern sensibilities, find any mention of truth, objective truth, angular or offensive. It might sound intolerant.

LAWTON: Emergent leaders say because the spectrum of their beliefs is so diverse, it’s impossible to make sweeping judgments. Tony Jones, Emergent’s new national coordinator, is not concerned by charges of theological sloppiness.

TONY JONES (National Coordinator, Emergent): Is it more sloppy than what a systematic theology professor does, sitting in his tenured chair typing up a book on the doctrine of the atonement? Yeah, it’s messier than that! But that’s, I think, theology as it works itself out in the lives of human beings who are kind of scratching and clawing their way to try to follow Jesus on a daily basis. It’s a messy endeavor, and I embrace that messiness.

Prof. MCKNIGHT: I understand that many of them want to ask good questions, but for things to be Christian means that there are answers and there are limits to what those answers can be.

LAWTON: There are also questions about the extent to which the emerging church conversation will push out beyond a white middle-class movement to become truly diverse and global, and whether it will have a lasting spiritual impact.

Mr. JONES: The emerging church is a place of conversation and dialogue and movement. Where that’s going to go, we don’t know. We’re figuring this out together. We don’t have an agenda of what it looks like at the end of the road. We just want to gather up people who are on this road, who want to go together on it.

LAWTON: And they believe that journey is just as important as a final destination. I’m Kim Lawton reporting.

ABERNETHY: Next week, in part two, Kim has an extended conversation with Brian McLaren, whose provocative writings have played a key role in the emerging church movement.